OMG I TOTES GOT REVIEWD

I have got some lavish e-press from Jana Perkovic at her great website guerilla semiotics


"If Invisible Atom is a finely crafted and balanced dish, akin to Fincher’s The Social Network, Richard Pettifer’s NO-SHOW, on the other hand, is a delicately woven wonder, very similar to what Spalding Gray achieves with a glass of water and some notebooks. Pettifer has so little to start with („I have no show“ is what he first says, and he is being entirely honest) that Invisible Atom, with its tight script and obvious months of development starts looking like a bloated whale in comparison, but the two one-man shows have a great deal in common nonetheless. They both spin a story almost without theatre: a little bit of light, a little bit of sound, some words. But where Invisible Atom tends towards Hollywood almost against its better judgement, instinctively – and this is fine, if you’ve read my rambling preamble – Pettifer turns the other way, towards a deconstructive anti-theatre, and tells a story without even perhaps knowing that that’s what he’s doing.



There is no fine weaving of theme and motif here, text and subtext. Pettifer tells the story of another theatre show, Smudged, which had a text, four actors, Twitter incorporated („Brecht and all that“), which Pettifer directed. The story is of the show we’re not seeing – resounding hints of Forced Entertainment, here, as Pettifer describes what happened on stage – of the process which led to the show, of the process failing, of the shows failing in their effects on the audience, but it’s ultimately Pettifer’s story, and he tells it with the same authenticity and investment with which my friend Goran told me of how his firm once again miraculously didn’t fail. One of the greatest problems of Australian theatre is this corrosive need to conflate a good story with some special event: death of a child, end of the world, massacre, war, history. NO-SHOW tells a simple story of how a piece of theatre was made, and there is more basic, essential human truth in it than an average recent year of Australian dramatic writing would muster if piled up in one large heap. If it’s gripping, engaging and rewarding, it is because it tells how it happened, shapes anecdotal and amusing detail with great gusto, and finishes touching upon the question of what it meant that it happened. It finds its structure, its skelleton, in a deeply personal place – it holds together because it makes sense to the narrator – and in that sense resembles the autobiographical works of Spalding Gray, works which showed a deep and strong internal coherence despite Gray’s own chaotic process.

Here, another anecdote: I learned almost nothing while studying theatre – theatre studies were a place where, by and large, there were no attempts to learn nor to teach – except that Spalding Gray got it right. One day, we watched him on DVD, talking about his doctor, his mother, losing sight, going to Cambodia, being neurotic, and so on, for hours, and then had to go away and write and perform a personal monologue. Every single person in the room came back with an excellent piece of dramatic writing, and an excellent performance thereof. People with no training in writing and barely any training in performance did a series of short performances that were absolutely top notch, talking about things that were personal, funny, paradoxical, but always interesting, interesting because they made sense to the person telling. NO-SHOW gets it right in the same way. Even though it looks like a very Pirandellian essay on what theatre is, it really functions as a story.

Both shows, no need to stress, are really worth seeing. Both are ending very soon after really short runs.

Invisible Atom is presented by FULL TILT and showing at The Arts Centre. Ends on Saturday, 12 February.

NO-SHOW is showing at La Mama and ends on Sunday, 13 February."


I don't really think I deserve such glowing words, but of course I am thankful for them, especially for a show that is so personal.

Of course, and I've had this argument with various people, to Jana it is a personal show, whereas to me it is very real, and in some senses not a 'show' at all so much as a... therapy session? Confessional? Which of course is precisely what it relies upon as theatre.

For example, Eli Glasman who was helping me with the writing, said at one point "I really liked the bit where the actors told you they were directing your show" and I said "yes, that was really hard" and he said "no, I mean the way you wrote it" and I said "yes, it was really hard to write it too" and he said "but it's a high quality piece of writing" and I said "it's not a piece of writing, it actually happened" and so on, it is perhaps an argument that I have with the audience, who naturally fictionalise, and me, to whom the experience is horribly real.

Anyway I can talk about this for hours and get nowhere.

I take a little finnicky issue with Jana's review that she will hate me for which is we had a conversation afterwards where she pointed out some of the play's shortcomings, which I mostly agreed with, but she has chosen not to publish these, which probably just means she understands more about reviewing than me in that people will not come to something if they think there's a chance it might be shit. People want to see good stuff. Success. So you need to be careful especially when you're reviewing an in-season show.

So I should say thanks Jana for her attention and analysis and remind everyone that box office goes partly to servicing my debt from Smudged and partly to the Queensland floods, so there are good reasons to come.