Live Performance Review: We're Probably Really Really Happy Right Now
After over a year of digitalised isolation, the simple joy of returning to live theatre in Melbourne for We’re Probably Really Really Happy Right Now can’t be overstated. The show’s limited run at Theatre Works in St Kilda proceeds nightly until March 6th and is selling fast – it feels wonderfully exciting to be seeing an original (Australian!) play with an audience again.
A new work by writer/performer Ellen Grimshaw, WPRRHRN is a raucous, delightfully heightened piece of theatre that tears open the facades and toxicities we’ve all come to accept in our daily life. Presented as a series of vignettes of recognisable (and less recognisable) social situations, the show features a range of brash, loud characters that take up space in a commanding way – many of them representing clear archetypes, in line with the production’s promotional material, which invokes the Italian theatrical tradition of Commedia dell’arte and its masked ‘types’. Indeed, in their expressive and dehumanising makeup, the performers stomp, scream, roll, gyrate, and dance; in a broad parody of people you might see on social media, or on the tram, or – gasp – embody in your own behaviour.
These absurdist characters are all united by their unapologetic liveliness – their resistance to shyness or convention – and in this way, Grimshaw’s play feels like a response to the perpetual bullshit of the various systems of compliance that we all endure. WPRRHRN often takes aim at social power dynamics, gender norms, conformity, and the pretences we put on for ourselves and those around us – it’s a funhouse mirror that’s disarming and frequently hilarious. The dialogue tends to give direct voice to our rebellious internal monologue, and equally, literalise the subtext of prejudice in otherwise polite interactions. It’s as if every scene’s lines had been passed through the subliminal-messaging sunglasses from They Live, until characters outright say things like “she’s difficult”, letting their uglier side come to the forefront, without inhibition. One particular stray shot at people who liked The Irishman had me wincing and chuckling in equal measure.
This kind of social satire can run the risk of falling into a whiny, “society, am I right?” tiredness, but the show is buoyed by its madcap energy. It’s never trite; it just bounces from sharp vignette to sharp vignette with dynamism, originality and humour.
Much of this liveliness is undoubtedly due to the elements of the production itself. The work of costumer and set designer Bethany J. Fellows is stunning, defined by its vibrant colour and clever suggestion. With one exception, the cast all cavort around in blocky, infantilising rompers you might expect to see on a baby – a provocative combination with the often-lurid content of the show. Likewise, the set, with its carpet of coloured squares and loose cushions, has a kindergarten-esque feel to it, doubling down on the funhouse-mirror stylings of the show.
Theatre Works’ Covid-19 Safe seating arrangements, surrounding the performing space.
Perhaps most interesting is the seating – the audience is positioned in closed-off clear perspex ‘booths’ that surround the stage on all four sides, with light installations along the edges that are visually captivating and accentuate the geometric feel (square tiled carpet, rectangular lit booths, boxy rompers… to be cute about it, it lines up). Generally, the walled-off seating is a fascinating early example of Covid-era live spectatorship. Ostensibly a result of socially isolated necessity, the booths themselves almost seem to function as an inversion of subjectivity, one that is played with regularly as the performers address the audience. It’s alienating. Sealed in clear, enclosure-like perspex, from a pronounced spatial remove, you can’t help but feel like you’re the one being looked at, and not the other way around.
The production also incorporates an intriguing audio-visual element, as a camera is wheeled around on a tripod, projecting a live feed to screens on the booths. Its wide-angle lens distorts the cast’s faces into even more absurd caricature – the device works best when it’s being used for phone calls, as the characters faces’ smudge comically up to the screen.
The young, energetic cast are fantastically game for the various absurdities of the material, and to single out any one performer would be a disservice to the ensemble. Under Sarah Vickery’s assured, well-calibrated direction, they bring tremendous energy and near-constant balance between dialled-up caricature and the necessary grounding in genuine emotional truth.
That emotional truth might indeed be the crux of the show – it tends to always come back to a place of retaliation. The loudness – the gaudy, ribald exaggeration – while often repellent, only ever appears to be responding to the existing, more insidious societal absurdities in modern life. A scene where a character desperately (and at great, almost tiresome length) struggles to articulate his condescending praise for a woman in any other way than “she’s so… quirky” was hilarious and wonderfully shrewd.
There are moments, of course, where the satire can feel like it’s ‘punching down’. Occasionally the injustice at which WPRRHRN takes aim is lost beneath the heightened characterisation. Sometimes among the vignettes, instead of seeing a person obliging a system of norms to which she is inescapably subject, you see only a ditzy girl peacocking on her Instagram account, and it feels bad-natured. That’s the rub of this kind of social parody, and if it wasn’t overwhelmingly coming from a place of real indignation - indignation at the evils of conformity and falsehood - it would threaten the integrity of the play. But its frustrations are honest, and they resonate. Perhaps the greatest strength of the show’s hilariously arch absurdity is its ability to reproduce in its audience that feeling of scrolling social media and seeing endless displays of naked vanity and superficiality. It makes for a very rewarding, and often challenging experience – a refreshing, exciting return to live theatre.
We’re Probably Really Really Happy Right Now is currently showing at Theatre Works through till the 6th of March.
Tickets and more info available here.