INNOCENCE TRIUMPHS IN WICKED WORLD
THE POPULAR MECHANICALS 1 and 2
Review by Pamela Payne Sydney Morning Herald June 25 1992
Imagine a sunny, innocent world inhabited by yeah simplest of folk. They”re loyal, kind and loving, true and doggedly honest. Each follows a craft with great seriousness and diligence. Not one of them is a sophisticated or complex thinker. Not has much concern for the larger, devious society of court and politics. Childlike, all of them can be easily tricked. All of them love a joke. And there’s nothing one bit subtle about their glorious sense of silliness. This is the world of the popular mechanicals: earnest, whimsical Bottom; Peter Quince, enthusiastic,punctilious artiste; dour Tom Snout with his corn cob; woolly-witted Snug; trusting, willing Francis Flute and the best and most eager little tailor in the whole of England, Robin Starveling.
In the first play, writers Keith Robinson and Tony Taylor, give us the mechanicals in their own domain. Certainly they venture out, even as far as the palace , a quaking, thespian crew. But, stage fright aside, we see them in a safe, benign environment.
Popular Mechanicals 1 is not so much a drama as an extended conceit. Joke pummels joke. Comedy leapfrogs and cartwheels across the stage. There are sight gags - can any comic routine top the chicken galliard? - and sound gags, mostly rude. There’s buffoonery and goonery. There are puns, bawdy word play and witty, out-of-context references to Shakespeare.
This Popular Mechanicals revival, is then, every bit as direly, triumphantly as the original 1987 version. From this starting point, Popular Mechanicals 2 explodes, five tears later, into the black, grotesque, treacherous world of the palace: of gross and extravagant sexuality, horrible cruelty, corruption and cunning.
Into this world come the mechanicals, trailing their innocence. And in the end, after the most dangerous, dastardly and full-bore comic adventures, they emerge unscathed. Such is their innocence.
Where the first play is sunshine, this second is the dankest shadow. This palace, created by Stephen Curtis’s configuration of inky velvet curtains, becomes a labyrinth. In its twisiting “purple passages” and eerie chambers there’s plotting and diabolical revenge. Here the clown-mechanicals encounter the weird court - and for all six performers there’s a frenzy of doubling. These actors handle the doubling with enormous flair, and a startling sense of the grotesque. There’s Bille Brown, an imposing canary yellow Queen; Kerry Walker, a duchess with gargantuan sexual appetite; Tony Taylor, a pink-ribboned maid-in-waiting. There’s the sleazy French marquis (Paul Blackwell): a Richard the Third writ ludicrous, Lord Chancellor, Big Normie (Keith Robinson) and , in good Elizabethan tradition, there are identical twin noblemen, (Lucia Mastrantone).
This Popular Mechanicals 2 is a much more perverse - and more structured - play than the first: an errant Jacobean tragedy that is also high comedy. There’s also much more at stake - or at least it seems until the final moments.
But although the two plays are so different in style and intent, they are quite emphatically two parts of a dramatic continuum. Together they do offer a coherent whole. This is reinforced by Geoffrey Rush’s deft, tight direction. He counterbalances one play against the other. He relishes the differences; but he also points to their similarities where they occur, particularly in tone.
Perhaps Rush’s greatest achievement - and it’s also the achievement of all six actors - is the precision and generosity of the ensemble work. This is inspired clowning. In the end these Popular Mechanicals 1 and 2 are a celebration of all that is hopeful and positive in the human condition.