Bliss review: Tedious interpretation of Carey classic
THEATRE
BLISS ★★½
Adapted by Tom Wright from the novel by Peter Carey
Malthouse Theatre, until June 2
Like the protagonist in his first novel Bliss, Peter Carey was an advertising man before he became one of Australia’s most celebrated authors.
He knew that the art of storytelling and the dark art of advertising both sprang from the same well, and this blackly comic fable – written as Carey was making his own transformation from spin doctor to artist – carries a confounding sense that the road to Damascus might also be the highway to hell.
This stage adaptation could certainly use some seductive advertising copy. It’s a purgatorial (if not quite hellish) experience – not least because Tom Wright’s script muddies exposition, leans towards a novelistic rather than a dramatic approach, and exposes a lack of ease with comedic form.
The result is turgid, earnest and far too long – a shapeless sack of scenes overstuffed with forced humour, limp caricature and half-hearted meta-theatrics that don’t work because you never suspend your disbelief long enough to forget you’re sitting in an auditorium.
When ad exec Harry Joy (Toby Truslove) wakes from a heart attack, the near-death experience convinces him he’s woken up in hell. Supporting evidence is all around him: his wife Bettina (Amber McMahon) has taken a lover (Mark Coles Smith) and turned into a corporate Clytemnestra, conniving to have her husband committed to a mental hospital so she can climb the greasy pole herself.
His daughter (Charlotte Nicdao) has become a drug addict and his son (Will McDonald) a dealer – and they’re committing incest into the bargain.
A performance style so incoherent the actors barely seem to be in the same play.
Will Harry find salvation in the arms of Honey Barbara (Anna Samson) – the questing, enigmatic hippy-type and occasional sex worker he’s infatuated with? Will he extricate himself from a fallen colleague (Marco Chiappi) who wants to steal his identity? Will he succeed in striving to be good when he’s sold his soul for so long?
Frankly, it’s hard to care.
According to director Matthew Lutton, the artists enjoyed finding layers of madcap humour during rehearsal. Unfortunately, the sense you get from this production is of one big in-joke the audience is excluded from.
We get irritating whimsy (group choreography to the Banana Splits), larded with dutiful paraphrase from the novel and delivered in a performance style so incoherent the actors barely seem to be in the same play.
It’s strangely disengaging, all that free-floating grotesqueness, unmoored from the human complexity that should anchor it.
The design compounds the alienation: costumes of haunting ugliness, truly obnoxious sound design and a large revolving stage that alternates between frenetic folly and barren longueur.
Bliss isn’t as tedious as Lutton’s The Trial – another comic show that fell flat – but it hardly does justice to the spirit and style of this famous Australian novel.