Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Double Indemnity is both gorgeous to look at and a great romp. Tom Holloway’s adaptation of James M Cain’s noir novel is slick, director Sam Strong’s direction is fluid, and the design team has excelled themselves in the realisation of its smoky, 1940s California.
But MTC’s show is not so much a loving homage to a bygone era as it is a postcard from a rapidly fading view of the world. The bold costume design flatters the stereotypes it presents, but the image of “woman” that floats across the lightscapes of the stage are more a reminder of what male writers such as Cain used to think about women, rather than what women theatre-makers do.
Phyllis, for instance, is clung in silk: the femme fatale, she lures her male prey into a web of deceit and murder. The girlishness of her virginal stepdaughter Lola provides a direct contrast – but Phyllis is eventually unspun by the plain, hardworking Nettie: the maternal and unrewarded office assistant, dressed in dour beige, who twigs to the mechanics of Phyllis’s plan.
These ancient archetypes of the virgin, mother and whore continue to saturate the canon of western theatre, but there were two other shows in Melbourne this month which offered proof of the difference four decades of feminism has made.
Nic Green’s two-and-a-half hour feminist masterwork, Trilogy, made its Australian debut at Arts House in June. Although it was originally conceived and presented 10 years ago, the experience of growing up and older within a female body – coupled with the evolving insight of professional practice, and Green’s overt engagement with the developing currents of feminism – has metastasised the work of agitprop into a profound meditation on the relationship of feminism to time.
It’s hard to conceive that Double Indemnity’s femme fatale could ever be considered more threatening to the masculine ego than Green herself, who thunders on to the stage naked with no less than 50 other naked women who are volunteers from the community.
Of all ages and sizes, they stomp and whirl to techno music like maenads in their rapture, a force of female power that the paranoid minds of the ancient Greeks used to condemn in terrifying bas-reliefs as “amazonomachy”. There was never a murder so clean than that of Norman Mailer’s ego, accomplished by the feminists Jill Johnston and Germaine Greer in the footage of their anarchic 1970s public debate, shown and re-enacted within Trilogy’s text.
Theorist Mary Ann Doane explained the femme fatale is not a representation of female agency but a confection of male desire. This is true of silken Phyllis in Double Indemnity as much as the converse is the case for Trilogy’s clothesless female choir, who steal back William Blake for feminism – Jerusalem was adopted as a suffragette anthem, after all – in a chorus of polyphonic bellowing.
Meanwhile, around a third Melbourne corner at the Richmond Theatrette, the ensemble members of the Quippings troupe not only seize the body’s power as the subject of their performance work but they explode it.
Quippings is described by its co-producer and ensemble member Jax Jacki Brown as something akin to a “crip burlesque”, although she finds the label limiting. The history and concept of the show is certainly more complex; when gay wheelchair-user Greg Acton found himself turned away from a Melbourne sex-on-premises venue in 2010, he protested, and around him formed a movement called Quip, to challenge ableism in Melbourne’s queer community.
The activist Kath Duncan suggested live performance as a medium for the group to further expand and explore discussions about sex, sexuality and disability within the queer community. Five years later Quippings schedules performances to coincide with the events and festivals of both the queer and disabilities calendars, offering wild, original cabaret variety line-ups in which all the participants identify as having disabilities, and the subject is always the erotic.
The ensemble is mixed gender as well as a mix of practice, but there are more women than men. Brown’s own contribution is as a spoken word artist; her work engages the intersections of her feminist and queer identity to engage the social model of disability, which is the focus of her work.
“The last performance was on the theme of secrets,” she explains to me, “and my piece was about the process of learning to keep secrets about myself, because for people with disabilities, keeping secrets about your own body becomes a political thing.”
For performers who “subvert the expectation of the erotic” just by placing their bodies in an erotic context, the work presented is a deliberate provocation – and Brown herself is often confronted by the work of her collaborators. Such as? “Kath Duncan is a congenital amputee and does work about stump fucking,” Brown explains. She’s also a fan of Duncan’s creation Shirley McBogan: a character who appears onstage to patronise everybody in the audience. Other performers are dancers, standup comics, sometimes singers.
There are marketing challenges to the show that productions such as Double Indemnity will never face, but perhaps Brown prefers it that way.
“If we try and reach the mainstream, we have to depoliticise our marketing,” she says, “but the work we make is unashamedly political because it’s disability human rights, and sexuality human rights. The stage is a space that people with these identities don’t get to determine that often. That’s valid, and it’s interesting, and I don’t want to lose that as a performer.”
