Highway Rock'n'Roll Disaster
Highway Rock’n’Roll Disaster Wharf 2, September 18-27, 2008; (02) 9250 1777 or www.sydneytheatre.com.au. The Border Project and Wharf2Loud.
WHICH is the chicken and which is the egg: Flight of the Conchords or Highway Rock’n’Roll Disaster? Wo’ever, fact is Adelaide’s Border Project has put its own twist on pastiche, homage and fragments of memory and come up with an engaging hour of … what exactly? It’s a bit theatre, a bit MTV, a bit performance art, a bit poetry slam and a bit art school rock gig. Perhaps it should be allotted Pigeon Hole No.5 – “Other”.
The clever thing among many clever things in this show is that while purporting to be about each cast member’s remembrances of tunes past, the “about” part is so loose that looking for a narrative thread is not the point. The narrative is whatever chords are struck in you by the crashing, tinkling, rippling shards of guitar riffs and song phrases. These may or may not be the real thing or they may be suggestions or echoes, but like all good pop songs, it’s whatever gets you through the night.
For such a flat out enterprise, Highway … actually gives you time to think and breathe. Although shreds of sound and morsels of rock clips are constantly set up and deconstructed, they are also lovingly re-enacted or cheekily parodied. So, despite the alienation and nihilism inherent in so much MTV footage, the affection, ingenuity, hard work and amusement brought to the project by the performers, the overall effect is engagement rather than distanciation.
Directed by Sam Haren, Highway … features eight performers: Katherine Fyffe, Cameron Goodall, David Heinrich, Jude Henshall, Andrew Howard, Paul Reichstein, Andrew Russ and Alirio Zavarce; plus a deeply involved crew of roadies (Daniel Koerner, Tim Kurylowicz, Luca James Lee, Lachlan Mantell and Kurt Murray) and a deceptively minimal set consisting mainly of a plain backcloth on which images and mini-films are projected and some mobile metal frames which actually do frame the action from time to time.
The performers are talented and a properly motley crew. They bring to life virtually every hilariously cliched moment in our pop-dominated lives, as well as some you may not thought of. Curiously, however, the one element that’s notably absent from this paean to the most dominant cultural force of the second half of the 20th century (a long-winded way of saying rock music) is the sex.
The truth is, the forces of rectitude were always right: rock music and rock stars did corrupt youth. Nobody went to a rock concert for the tunes, it was all about sheer, sweaty, out there, sweet-acrid throbbing sex. It’s what guitar heroics is all about: it’s what fellating the mike is all about; it’s why rock stars are, um, rock stars: you wanted to get your sticky fingers on them (whatever gender or preference you happened to be sporting at any given time).
Ironically perhaps, it’s what the all pervasive influence of the product-led culture of the MTV video clip has leached out of rock: the clips have sort of Disneyfied music and made it safe for general exhibition. In retrospect, what a bummer. And sex in music was finally done for by the tsunami of Michael Jackson’s crotch-grabbing, pelvic thrusting, ghoul chorus of Thriller – the most peculiar and peculiarly inept attempt at sexual depiction ever.
See – it really makes you think.
