In his programme note director Daniel Schlusser mentions that the plays author Ben Ellis’ inspiration for this play came from testimonials by Victorian workers in response to the Howard Government's Commission for the Living Wage. Inspired by the "vivid, dramatic and often filmic terms people used to describe their lives" Ellis incorporated some statements, verbatim, into the script. Schlusser also attributes some unspecified influence from horror films in the play as a means of making an entertaining metaphor. Specific horror films are not mentioned or referred to explicitly in the play but lurking seagulls, glimpsed at first in the excellent video montages of scavenging seagulls and burst of flame evoking Crown Casino, might be read as homage to Hitchcock's The Birds. The overriding metaphor however, is the Zombie, which came into its own sometime in the 1940s. Vampires were seen as aloof, aristocratic creatures, Aliens as totalitarian invaders, Wolf men and the variously assembled or created Monsters as individuals set apart from the populous. The Zombie, mindless, desensitised, depersonalised and indentured has come to embody the mass. For devouring brains read devouring reason and self-determination (it takes the fun out of the genre but what post-structural analysis of popular culture doesn't?). In one of Hammer Studio's rare forays into the Zombie genre The Plague of the Zombies the script was a Marxist nightmare where an aristocrat Capitalist in remote Cornwall used Voodoo to raise then enslave the dead in his tin mine. The same idea of Zombie as exploited workforce is at work in The Zombie State where citizens are kidnapped on buses that ignore all stops and transport them to an underground lair. Meanwhile Kevin (Syd Brisbane), a charismatic and work obsessed Australian Prime Minister is holding a conference called 2021 in Melbourne where the brightest and best, or the 'brains', as he calls them. Apart from him and his personal staff the cast are workers and all mindlessly and tirelessly carrying out their function. "To work is life, to sleep is death" cries the unstoppable exotic dancer at a nightclub the PM visits in order to boost his personality ratings.
Everyone PM Kevin and his staff encounter in Melbourne is cadaverous and overworked. Ellis’ intention is that the real-life situations drawn from the testimonials be genuinely honoured and isolated scenes, performed off stage are televised on screens on either side of the stage to distinguish them from the Zombie borrowings which are used to create a satire, artfully and cautiously avoiding tipping over into an outright farce until the blood-fest ending. That premise is good even though the blending of serious and satirical intention sometimes makes for ambiguities of point and purpose.
picture: Ponch Hawkes
The last part is the most entertaining when the Zombie takeover nears completion and where the design is exceptional. After a prologue the full stage is revealed as a steeply angled corridor with its doorways curtained by plastic strips, as you would find in a meat processing works. On either side of the stage perspex boxes suggesting alternative realities where the Zombies do not go. The video projections and cinema references are recreated very artfully even extending to employing an amplified cellist to provide the nervous string sound heralding the plays climax where the PM and his staffers, drenched in blood rejoice in their new 'Zombie State'.
The Zombie State (2008) by Ben Ellis
Director - Daniel Schlusser
Design - Kate Davis
Lighting Design - Niklas Pajanti and Danny Pettingill
Sound Design - Darrin Verhagen
Video Design - Matthew Gingold
17–27 September 2008
Melbourne Worker's Theatre & Union Theatre, University of Melbourne
2 comments:
night of the living wage ... HA!
I can't help myself sometimes.
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