Quack

First published on 26 Aug 2010. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

A strange disease has taken hold of a God-forsaken town in the middle of nowhere. Certain townsfolk have acquired an odd, lurching, shuffling gait and are developing disturbing new appetites. The town’s doctor Littlewood (Chris Haywood) is in denial and at loggerheads with medicine man blow-in Doctor Waterman (Charlie Garber), who’s enthusiastically toting a miracle elixir of dubious origin. Local girl Fanny Dillon has an axe in her hands and escape in her eyes – one regular eye and one cold, dead eye that may have seen too much.

Director Chris Mead, cast and crew have given playwright Ian Wilding’s twisted and thorny thicket of a script a funny and fabulous vaudeville flavour. William Bobbie Stewart’s set features a tattered red curtain that opens and closes to the clinking of rusty chains, and Fanny Dillon (Aimee Horne) gets a couple of unexpected musical numbers (there’s a particularly haunting rendition of ‘Hurt’), part-cabaret, part-freakshow. It’s Garber, as usual, who brings the comedy to the show as Waterman, with his recurring oblivious smile and insistence on orating poetry. It’s an energetic comic performance.

The play is firmly planted in the tradition of Grand Guignol – theatre intended to horrify and sicken. Wilding’s text is at its most juicy describing the myriad terrors offstage, while onstage the spewing of orifices and expulsion of bodily fluids reaches farcical extremes. There’s some urophagia and orchiectomy thrown in for good measure, and a palpable sense of the horror closing in – due in no small part to David Heinrich’s haunted house sound design. The cast play it up brilliantly, even at one point mimicking the whooping thrill-ride reactions of the audience.

It’s a play about zombies, of course, but it’s not just gore that Quack is soaked with. Equally intended to repulse and horrify is its display of contemporary politics. There’s some particularly perceptive satire of empty political rhetoric and grandstanding – indeed, the doctors are walking, talking political caricatures, even in their striking physicality: the squat old fuddy-duddy conservative and the swirling, aimless, lanky limbs of the idealistic newcomer. Some of the references come dangerously close to revue territory – even Eyjafjallajokll gets a mention – but it helps that it’s all done with a nudge and a wink.
 
The play seems to end rather than finish – one gets the sense that the story is not adequately buried, let’s say – and occasionally the meaning is lost among the relentless splatter of colourful language and viscera. But it’s all so entertaining that you probably won’t mind. Quack is a fiendish and filthy Griffin comeback to the SBW Stables Theatre. It’s great to see theatre with this much bite. Darryn King

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Preview:

Expat Brit Ian Wilding has made a name for himself in Australia for his provocative satirical plays. Forever Seven portrayed a future population able to halt the ageing process. Torrez gave us footballers behaving badly, while October explored post-9/11 paranoia. At first glance, Quack, his latest play, is a shocking detour: it's the story of a plague of zombies descending on 19th century outback Australia.

"What we needed was a really powerful motif for the outside world," Wilding says. "Using zombies helped us make sense of the kind of social critique we're trying to do."

The hallmarks of the horror sub-genre are all here. The flesh-eating, limb-tearing and viscera-flinging; the swarming hoards of afflicted drones; the sudden human de-evolution. Wilding, in partnership with director Chris Mead - "He's a bit of a zombie nerd," Wilding says - has transferred the popular breed of horror film to the stage with gusto.

In a return to stage horror à la Paris's turn-of-the-century Grand Guignol theatre, Wilding hopes to stun desensitised modern movie audiences. "They've forgotten what it's like to have blood and gore in front of them," he says.

As with some of the best undead flicks, the zombies in Quack aren't mere pawns for schlocky, blood-soaked entertainment. Wilding's zombie epidemic is a comment on decaying moral systems and the horrors of modern science. "It's not just people running up the street, groaning and moaning and slobbering," Wilding says. "I wouldn't call it a ‘zombie play'. It's a play... with zombies in it."

The play is also, in fact, a political analogy. Wilding was inspired by the endless cycle of governments that show initial promise but ultimately disappoint, and the play will make a timely post-election debut in late August.

Quack is set in an Australian mining town, whose very core is threatened by the ailing health of the local workforce. Two warring doctors in the play - the conservative Littlewood and progressive Waterman - emerge like snake-oil salesmen. "God and science and hands clasped together" is how Waterman describes his healing elixir's ingredients. Neither doctor is capable of solving the complaints of the miners, despite their initial pledges and enthusiasm.

But let's not forget the gore. Zombie attacks abound - including that of a defenceless wombat ("fur and sinew and all together in one filthy hairy pie," reports one character) while a Greek-style chorus reports graphically on other goings-on in the town.

Then there are Littlewood's questionable medical procedures. "How many of these so-called lost souls have got your kangaroo and goat and piggy-bits stitched into their scrota?" Waterman declares. "But it's all done in the best possible taste," says Wilding.

So just how much arterial spray should theatregoers be prepared for? "Blood and gore - we'll do all that," assures Wilding. "Oh, and pus, as well." Front rows, be warned. Alecia Wood