Sisters, is it performance art? Yes, but far more than that as well. Straight from the Brisbane Festival Sydney audiences were lucky to see FIGHT THE LANDLORD, this strange, yet fabulous and riveting show in a brief season at Carriageworks.
The breathtaking set is a curved maze of trees, with cards scattered on the pathway, leading to a small circular performance space where there is a large red table in the middle with three women dressed as pandas. We, the audience, sit in a circle around this as if around the edges of the clearing of a forest. Or is it?
We feel as if we have stumbled into the middle of a strange fairytale. There are also hanging lamps, TV screens for the surtitles and umpteen streams of flashing fairylights almost like at a casino. (The only problem with the great surtitles is that your attention has to switch constantly between the performers and the translation which can mean you miss certain subtle inflections of meaning and various finely tuned movements).
FIGHT THE LANDLORD is the second collaboration between Pan Pan Theatre of Ireland and Beijing’s Square Moon Culture. In the style of contemporary Chinese Absurdist theatre blended with ‘post – modern meta theatre’, it’s a cutting edge analysis of the position of women in society today.
The eponymous card game is used as an allegory for Life and a springboard to look at all sorts of issues including money, politics , celebrity gossip ,marriage ,property prices , popular culture, beauty, trashy mags ,3D movies and the manipulation of the media. In a further context ,the card game is also representative of the class struggle and inequality of China’s Cultural Revolution.
The conversational tone is at times unhurried and friendly; yet at other times it is driven and very competitive , in tandem with how the card game is going. Humourous skits and monologues are contrasted with harsh rhetoric. As one of the panda performers’ comments, how a person plays games often indicates how they live life.
The role of poets in today’s society is discussed and the show is a cry against the dull grind of being stuck in a job that demands robotic underpaid mediocrity. Life is full of ennui and tiredness. Do we dare to fight? (Yes there are Chekhov quotes as well as from ‘Waiting For Godot ‘. As well, there are Western classical music references). For most of the show they are in panda suits but the show also involves role playing in ordinary clothes.
The three performers (Sun Yue, Wang Jinglei, Zhu Zhutong) give finely honed, impassioned performances .All three can do the ‘triple threat’ ( act, sing and dance) .In the opening scene, sound is important – first the shuffle and slap of the cards and then the way they do sounds and various rhythms , percussive like, with their voices. There is also use of rhythm and repetition at various points of the show.
Sometimes the performers dive beneath the table to change seats, sometimes they perform in the aisle, or on top of the table.
Profound yet engrossing and very entertaining this is bold, vivid and exciting -funny and simultaneously extremely thought provoking, theatre.
With a running time of about one hour, FIGHT THE LANDLORD played Carriageworks between the 2nd and 5th October, 2013.