The greatest challenge of A Social Service, a collaboration between Nicola Gunn and David Woods, is managing your own high expectations going into it.
Woods is a regular performer with the Australian theatre ensemble, Back to Back, and a veteran of 25 years in the groundbreaking UK company, Ridiculusmus, fresh from theatrical triumphs including The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland and the frenetic, hilarious The World Mouse Plague.
Meanwhile, Gunn’s stellar reputation as a theatre-maker and performer rests on her unique combination of high-end conceptual art and clowning. In Spite of Myself at the 2013 Melbourne festival was both hilarious and thoroughly footnoted. Hello My Name Is... at Theatre Works combined ping-pong with bathetic Care Bears and a live highlights reel.
So it comes as something of a shock that Woods and Gunn should unite for a show that eschews their notoriously flashy throws. A Social Service revisits a theme – the cultural outcomes of social policy – that runs through the work of both artists.
This is not an epic study of humanity on the scale of Back to Back’s Ganesh Versus the Third Reich (which considered disability in Holocaust politics), nor does it work with the desperate community worker of Hello My Name Is. What is offered by A Social Service is something as close to the traditional well-made play as one could reasonably expect from Gunn, Woods and the Malthouse theatre, Melbourne’s main stage home of experimental performance.
In a linear narrative, Gunn plays herself, an artist-in-residence in a public housing complex in Melbourne. She answers to John Walker, the sponsor of her residency, but must work with Rory, the volatile president of the residents’ association, as well as dealing with a silent security guard who answers her practical demands with a distracted, sullen glare.
All three characters are played as intense caricatures by Woods. Gunn’s frustrated and frustrating attempts to recruit the community into her art project take the form of conversations with a homegrown “artist” – played at the Malthouse on a nightly rota, script in hand, by community volunteers from the housing estate where Gunn researched the play.
This device brings a grounding authenticity to the unfolding drama, one that allows both Woods and Gunn to indulge in some flights of fun self-satire, and Shaan Juma’s comfortable, unaffected performance in this role on opening night was a credit to the production.
Employing a volunteer from the actual community that’s discussed in A Social Service is also a powerful metaphor for the play’s story of inclusion and exclusion in public housing policy and the arts; the greatest recommendation of the piece is that it is not patronising. Gunn’s character enters her residency with artistic sophistication, but the thrust of the play is her growing realisation that the political role of the artist is not a neutral one; while she may be a master of her craft, she exists as a servant of forces far more powerful.
The play opens a little slowly perhaps, but this facilitates a tense acceleration of events and stakes. It’s an engaging, topical and well-executed handling of a subject few Australian theatre-makers would go near on a main stage for fear of didacticism. It is also very funny; Woods’ quick changes are pure showmanship while Gunn’s marvellous piss-takes of her own artistic snobbery drew many laughs from the jaded Malthouse crowd.
Those yearning for more dazzling Gunn/Woods effects will find them in fleeting moments. But this is not a showcase for its performers so much as the appropriate vehicle for a discussion about housing that needs to be had. And it’s no less skilful or relevant for being treated with subtlety.
• A Social Service is at Malthouse theatre, Melbourne until 29 August
