SYDNEY FESTIVAL - BIGGER THAN JESUS
BIGGER THAN JESUS, Wharf 1, January 19-29.
Because of the subject matter – a one hour–20 minute, one-man, five loaves and two fishes history and analysis of Christianity – most members of the audience will arrive with baggage. After experiencing Rick Miller’s mullti-award-winning, “multi-media mass” most members of the audience will leave the theatre with different baggage, or at the very least, their baggage will have been comprehensively re-arranged.
As well as the cunningly contrived Latin mass structure, Bigger Than Jesus is also a celebration of story-telling and of a superb performer; for me, it’s one of the highlights of the 2011 Sydney Festival.
Miller is well qualified to deliver a thesis on the history and fictions of Catholicism in particular and the Christian industry in general. He’s a lapsed Catholic (and many in the audience obediently put up their hands, on request, to make the same confession) and he’s clearly been questioning the orthodoxies and nonsense for many years. He is a beguiling and witty visitor: wowing audiences last year with the brilliant MacHomer and as an integral part of Robert Lepage’s Lipsynch before that.
What he does in Bigger Than Jesus (with director and collaborator Daniel Brooks is deceptively gentle and charming, because underneath the light-hearted approach is a profound search for sense and meaning that goes well beyond his apparently tongue-in-cheek “Church of Rational Thought”.
Miller’s inventive show is non-stop, speedy and, in its 80 minutes, takes him and us on a whirlwind ride of ideas and deconstruction through the 2000+ years since a 33-year-old Jew got himself in fatal strife with imperialist Rome. Yet another brilliant Canadian (Anthony Black and Invisible Atom are also here), Miller is a fabled mimic and voice actor and he starts out as a geekily earnest theologian, continues as a wildly inflammatory Southern evangelist; and finally explores images and aspects of Jesus himself. And of course, there’s a version of Star Wars, via a camera, a pile of sand and toy figures that explains everything you’ve ever wanted to know but didn’t know who to ask.
A person would have to work very hard, or be so bigoted in the first place that nothing would make a difference, to find Bigger Than Jesus offensive – to any religion. It’s unfortunate that, for the first time in his international travels with the show, Miller has been (half-heartedly) targeted in Sydney by a small number of daft zealots. As none have seen or want to see the show, taking them seriously is not an issue – aside from the embarrassment factor. Nevertheless, if you feel like contacting your inner Jesus or being gently prodded to think, laugh and marvel: Bigger Than Jesus is for you.
