Madame Night Shade's Poison Garden - Melbourne Fringe 2017

Madame Night Shade's Poison Garden - Melbourne Fringe 2017

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Posted 2017-09-23 by Samsarafollow

Thu 21 Sep 2017 - Sun 01 Oct 2017

In a post-modern world, we have the luxury of exploring all the performance forms in history and Anna Thomson plays with two of the greatest - clowning and the absurd - in Madame Night Shade's Poison Garden . La Mama Theatre becomes the trash heap of the world until 1 October as the sly shape-shifting Beatrice taunts and teases us about our modern excesses.



Thomson is a clown trained in Le Coq and by John Bolton and is possibly best known for her work with the clown troupe Po Po Mo Co. Thomson's work lays in a gender fluid context and is backed up by skills acquired through training and years working with The Women's Circus.

The character, Madam Nightshade ,was created as part of her work with Po Po Mo Co and now, with the help of director Sarah Ward and dramaturg Jaye Hayes , Thomson has given Nightshade (or more accurately her devilish assistant Beatrice) a show of her own. Emerging into a dystopic wasteland where beauty is shit and shit is beauty, the audience is plunged into an awareness of how badly we treat what we love and need.



Nightshade/Beatrice laughs and plays in the refuse of the world. She insists the audience comes and join her, telling us she will teach us how to drink our own poison. Following down foul odours in the room Beatrice discovers her body is not the source. Trapped in a garden of consumer waste, the vegetables have turned into weapons of mass destruction with celery shooting chilli bullets at an 'innocent' audience. You know when spring onions turn into Samurai swords there is something seriously wrong in the world.

In a world, Beckettesque in its conception, Beatrice's laughter and play cannot hide the despair and concern for a world where we destroy what we love. Madame Night Shade's Poison Garden reminds me of a little poem I came across in high school:
%%Little bird with broken wing
Cannot laugh, cannot sing...
May as well kill the bloody thing!%%



Perhaps the most confusing aspect of the show was the gender identity commentary. I understand it is the lens of Thomson's work but I don't think it was clear enough how, in her art, this idea merges with the environmental commentary. Of course, the piece is absurdist to the whole environment is a logic-free zone...

Make your way to La Mama for a night of classic theatre with modern themes and hard edges we all need to cut ourselves on. Thomson will have you howling with laughter as she wakes us up from our indolent environmental slumber.

4 Stars

#carlton
#comedy
#festivals
#indoor
#inner_east
#nightlife
#theatre
#september
!date 21/09/2017 -- 01/10/2017
%wnmelbourne
134760 - 2023-06-13 10:56:55

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