Monstrously more interesting than almost anything on the Sydney’s main stages at the moment, MONSTROUS mounts a provocative production of transgressive tensions.
The play opens with a transgression, a live theatre show starting with projected screen credits like a movie. At the end of the credits we get a quote from My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix Performing Transgender Rage by Susan Stryker, the inspiration for what the audience is about to experience.
It’s a kitchen sink drama, or more correctly, an office kitchen sink drama, as company motivator, John, encounters company’s FIFO IT fixit guru, Chris, in the company’s kitchen.
A brio bit of banter about PC and HR hilariously lays bare some glaring passive prejudices. John’s job as Director of Wellbeing and Inclusion at RISE community services proves to be a bit of a flim flam sham and trans Chris, rat tailed hair and inked up sleeves, proves quite a flashpoint – or flesh point, as the case maybe.
John’s decision to enter into an intimate encounter with Chris has mindboggling transformative consequences. Saliva, blood, gaping wounds, incongruous wombs, tadpoles, vampirism and cannibalism are put through the transgender blender to thrilling theatrical juice.
Alluding to Mary Shelley and perhaps a bit of Franz Kafka and certainly David Cronenberg, MONSTROUS is also elusive, but compellingly so, imaginative rather than irritating.
Written by Lu Bradshaw with Zev Aviv and Byron Davis who play Chris and John, and directed by Lu Bradshaw, MONSTROUS, luxuriates in ambiguity and metaphor. It has situation and suspense, a suspension of disbelief, and proof you can spend an hour in the dark without being bored.
The dialogue is fleet footed and the actors run with it. Zev Aviv’s Chris is sardonically sinister and Byron Davis infuses a mercurial matter to John’s manifestly amazing metamorphosis.
MONSTROUS plays KXT Broadway till November 15
