Live Performance Review - Muthering Heights

Image courtesy of Post Humorous.

Tessa and Julian Stickland return to the Melbourne Fringe Festival with a show weirder than ever! This is not your average puppet show.

The pair broke into the Melbourne Fringe Festival scene in 2019 with their show Eleven Suburban Scenes, a collection of monologues set in the suburbs of Melbourne described by Julian Stickland as “a marriage of traditional theatre and traditional fucking around for your experiential pleasure”. Now the dramatic duo has emerged three years later with

Muthering Heights —as in the music video Wuthering Heights (Version 2) (1987) by Kate Bush about the Wuthering Heights (1847) novel by Emily Brontë—, an absurdist comedy about their mother Robyn Stickland, a survivor of anaphylactic pulmonary arrest, a brain injury, and endurer of medical PTSD. Now Robyn has been brought back to life as a purple puppet!

In Muthering Heights, Robyn experiences anaphylaxis, after she is administered the anaesthetic Suxamethonium during an emergency gall-bladder surgery, and goes into a coma. Robyn then wakes up in the Republic of Fairies and is taken on a journey by various creatures through the unknown. In the ultimate battle to the death, Robyn competes against Death in a high-stakes game of Scrabble.

I must confess that I am related to Tessa and Julian - they are my cousins, so I have an insider perspective on the subject matter of this play. It’s not every day you get to see your aunt played by a hand puppet! Additionally, there is no incentive for me to write this review. Now with this conflict of interest out of the way, let’s get on with the review.

Now, you might be wondering how PTSD and comedy go together. All it takes are a couple of puppets, strings, accents, props, and some whimsical imagination. Muthering Heights responds to the macabre with EXTREME silliness, a refreshing approach to handling trauma. Like the saying goes, sometimes it’s better to laugh about it than cry!

This performance is as delightful as it is strange and features many scenes that bewilder the audience including guest appearances from one of the King Georges and Jesus Christ, a PowerPoint presentation on the intertextuality of King Lear (1606) by William Shakespeare in The Lion King (1994) movie, a recreation of the tunnel scene from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), an intermission where the audience is harassed by a bird, and a re-enactment of Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights (1987) iconic red dress dance.

My main qualm with this show is that the little girl that Robyn helps on a quest speaks in a South African accent. To my understanding, this little girl represents Robyn’s inner child, a child who did not speak in a South African accent in real life. I felt that this accent may have misled the audience and taken away the grounding for this scene in the play.

There are many layered references woven throughout the plot of Muthering Heights. With a penchant for the absurd, it’s clear that the Sticklands intended for these references to go right over the audience’s head. Still, the other audience members chuckled and sniggered in all the right places.

Muthering Heights is a low-budget production with big ideas. It was certainly a unique opportunity to watch a fictionalised documentary about my own family played out on the stage of the Butterfly Club downstairs.

I wonder what Robyn the puppet will get up to next!?

Keep up to date with the Sticklands’ future silly shenanigans @posthumorous__ on Instagram.

Follow Amelia on Instagram and Letterboxd.

Muthering Heights showed as part of the 2023 Melbourne Fringe Festival. For more info, click here.