THEATRE
WILD BORE ★★★
Zoe Coombs Marr, Ursula Martinez & Adrienne Truscott
Malthouse Theatre, until June 4
REVIEW A trio of defiant, whip-smart comediennes from three continents, Zoe Coombs Marr, Ursula Martinez and Adrienne Truscott have a taste for meta-theatre and, as anyone who has seen their solo work will know, they've got a lot of cheek between them.
Wild Bore puts it all on display in a flagrant and funny burlesque on theatre criticism, assembled largely from the direst reviews they can find, including slags of their own work.
It opens at a trestle-table, the three performers baring their bums to the audience. In an inspired bit of butt-puppetry, their gaping anuses pontificate, taking a rather large dump on the show being created.
I haven't encountered such brazen and tasteless hilarity since the singing sphincter-man in John Waters' Pink Flamingos, and the fart-arsing around continues as we get further up and further in, with merciless critical putdowns ridiculed by visual metaphor, from reviewers talking out of their arses to, in one memorable scene, critics as shameless bottom-feeders.
It's theatre about criticism that critiques its own critique (through theatre) and, annoyingly from a prospective reviewer's standpoint, Wild Bore pre-empts any possible criticism you might make of it. A show that disappears up its own bunghole? The artists say so. With nudity less radical for having been around since the 70s? Ditto. Self-referential navel-gazing of marginal interest to the general public? Check.
Naturally, you can't guard against negative criticism by beating a reviewer to the punch, nor is Wild Bore somehow magically better just because it slags itself off as it goes along. (Constantly averting to his own rudeness will not make a rude man seem more polite, after all, any more than an ugly haircut will be less ugly for the stylist anticipating all objections to it.)
And if the show does sometimes wilfully flaunt its aesthetic flaws in ways that don't rise above them, it also creates a strange loop between art and criticism.
For all its mocking satire of critical and artistic pretensions and failures, Wild Bore nimbly shows how the critical spirit and the creative one exist in a symbiotic relationship, rather than an arbitrary antithesis – a fact crucial to theatre's continuing evolution, from the flowering of feminist theatrical practice and critique to the inclusion of new voices and novel pleasures.
When at the show's climax a brown-skinned, transgendered performer (Krishna Istha) appears, complete with miniature trestle-table, to deliver their own sharp critique of Wild Bore, you're left with a joyous sense of how recursive and endless the dance between art and criticism really is.