SYDNEY ARTS GUIDE (I)
26 May 2025
Richard Cotter
“This is not theatre enslaved to logic but liberated by the spirit of anarchy”
REVIEW
THE ANARCHY [1138-53]
The ack ack of Acker, a barrage of verbiage, bullseye and bullshit, projectile speech spew taking aim, misfiring, have another shot, it’s anarchy alright, all wrong and all right, a pendulum swing between profane and pretentious.
Truth in title and execution, THE ANARCHY(1138-53) is sibling scene squealers, Tobias Manderson-Galvin and Kerith Manderson-Galvin, he and they, presenting a frenetic, kinetic, hysterical history lesson, sort of.
Delivering a tirade of Tourette’s type text splutter spoken in a ranting scat into hand held microphones, he more adept than they, these theatrical saboteurs and narrative annihilators present a work about dark times.
This is taken literally, to an extreme, the first forty minutes of the performance an ex positional tutorial played in darkness with accompanying cacophony. Lighting Designers Tobias Manderson-Galvin and Kerith Manderson-Galvin took the crown as the princes of darkness.
Somewhere in the middle there’s light, shedding some intangible interest until the piece finishes with an interminable twenty minute epilogue. Entertaining an exit.
Post punk modernism alluding to Dark Age antiquarianism, THE ANARCHY (1138-53) is produced under the Dopplegangster banner, Dr Tom Payne, with Pat Fielding, Chelsea Hickman, et al, performance provocateurs and serial non sequiturists.
Some will find its two hours and fifteen minutes length two hours too much, wearing and wearying and wrist watch worrying, bum numbing, bladder challenging and maddeningly ear bashing.
Often annoying, THE ANARCHY (1138-53) is a free fall in form with no delusions of grammar, where allusions to grandeur abound, grounded in post grad grunge frip and fop flip floppery.
Endure to be entertained, entertainment as endurance. A certain audience will find an irresistible savour in THE ANARCHY (1138-53), others may find it as incongruous as a tiara on an emu, experiencing a bout of anarchicphobia.
This is not theatre enslaved to logic but liberated by the spirit of anarchy and caprice, play as palimpsest.