ANNA ROBI & THE HOUSE OF DOGS
Anna Robi & the House of Dogs, Old Fitzroy, produced by House of Dogs with Tamarama Rock Surfers; 18-November-12 December, 2011; photos: Jeanette Cronin and Stefanie Smith, byAlex Vaughan
.MAXINE MELLOR is an audacious talent with an apparently boundless imagination and will to explore the nooks and crannies of humanity. In Anna Robi and the House of Dogs she has written a play that actually gets into the nooks and crannies that most of us were taught at a very young age to stay away from; although many have surreptitiously continued to do the forbidden ever since. Consequently, guilty laughter and barely suppressed gasps of appalled recognition ripple around the Old Fitz in waves of horror and delight throughout the 90 minutes of life with Anna (Stefanie Smith) and her mother (Jeanette Cronin).
The publicity blurb for this new play, from an already prolific young writer, suggests you think Bad Boy Bubby meets Kath & Kim, but there's also more than a whiff - make that reek - of Grey Gardens in the air too. However, where Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier lived and squabbled among tribes of cats and high society in their crumbling Long Island mansion, Anna and her mother are at the other end of the social spectrum.
Mother is a not-so-crazy harpy who's decided to be bed-ridden and needy and takes energetic delight in her bodily failings. She has been a successful dog breeder, apparently, but something - the vagaries and disappointments of life perhaps - has caused her to retreat from the world and concentrate on bullying her daughter instead.
With her bottle glasses and severe underbite Anna is on the unfortunate side of the fence, as well as naïve. Being brought up in a puppy factory means she knows all about the mechanics but nothing about the emotions and intricacies of the mating game. Roger, on the other hand, cares nothing for emotions and relationships but is very happy to engage in phone sex with the young woman he's "met" through a classified ad. For the audience, Roger (Dean Mason) is a disembodied voice accompanied by the SFX of vigorous and lubricious masturbation, until he appears in Anna's fantasies - and these are played out to Doris Day tunes: a star whose sunny and squeaky clean persona hid a much darker female reality.
Ironically, it's through the snatches of perky 1950s songs and relative newcomer Smith's approach to her character that Mellor's play achieves the resonance and depth that allows the crazy and revolting undomestic comedy to really soar. The two women live in believable but awful squalor. The floor is covered in newspapers and occasional dog turds, abandoned meals, heaps of catalogues and tottering piles of newspapers. The bed they both inhabit makes Tracey Emin's infamous installation look antiseptic by comparison. Bizarre on one level, yet it's a familiar scene from any number of suburban stories when Council workers are called in to deal with the detritus of failed and abandoned lives: there but for the grace of god etc etc.
What sets apart Mellor's play, however, is the unexpected poetry of the writing, the incisive and wicked humour, her gasp-a-minute refusal to be mindful of offending the sensitive and Jeanette Cronin's willingness to be as daring and uncompromising as the author requires. Cronin is an actor whose versatility, experience and talent are backed up by almost suicidal bravado. Strangely beautiful with long, sleek limbs and rubbery features, she is also sufficiently unselfconscious (or self conscious enough - which is it?) to flash the most absurd thatch of faux pubes that don't belong to an orang utan.
Director Iain Sinclair, fresh from the triumph of Our Town, displays equal guts and versatility by taking the play and his cast as far as its ambitions demand. At the same time, he doesn't step over the invisible line that would topple it into silliness: even though they're patently crazy and teetering on the edge of cartoonville, there is much to care about even as you laugh. Some of that concern stems from Anna's poignant relationship with her favourite dog who skulks under the bed and is called Kyoko, which she says means "pure" but which the baby name website just consulted, means "mirror". Either way the incongruity is full of the pathos that is at the heart of the best comedy.
The pathos is enhanced by Kyoko - a weirdly realistic puppet constructed of bits of old machinery, fabric and leather that's tenderly operated by Stefanie Smith. Another dog - a male with an hysterically appropriate lipstick dick - makes a brief appearance in the hands of Cronin and these amazing constructions are the work of Meg Ashforth and Jemima Snars. The show's other creatives are equally high calibre: set designer Tobhiyah Feller has created an environment that provokes equal parts giggles and shudders that are supported and enhanced by Steve Toulmin's sound design - music, dogs and grisly FX - and Teegan Lees' lighting. It's a shoestring production in every way but the outcome is wondrously funny and awful. Not for the faint-hearted or squeamish; everyone else will revel in the coming of age of yet another fine Australian writing talent.
