Hideous Portraits

INSANITY and genius are two qualities often associated with creative people, and often exploited successfully in the theatre. Characters who are inspired, crazy and unpredictable are far more fun and interesting than characters who fall within the accepted range of normalcy.

This precept has been exploited to great effect by Tom Wright in Hideous Portraits, his adaptation of Thomas Bernhard's play Ritter, Dene, Voss. The production, which also marks actor Wright's debut as a director, is a fast, eccentric, rant and rave of a show that has only the most fleeting relationship with reality.

Hideous Portraits is set in the Melbourne ancestral home of three neurotic and intellectually pretentious brothers. Melba and Moncrieff are actors involved in ridiculously arty shows who babble constantly about their craft, and nervously await the arrival at dinner of their famous philosopher brother, Burchett, who has just been released from a mental institution.

The three brothers are bound together in a seething mess of sibling rivalry, love, fear and loathing, which manifests in nervous, almost orgiastically affectatious philosophising and petty quibbling. Melba (Jerome Pride) and Moncrieff (Christoper Davis), who have lived a long time together like a pair of sparring old maids, have struck a precarious balance, but this evaporates when Burchett (Ben Rogan) descends the stairs to the dinner table and injects a solid dose of maniacal ravings and extravagant, unpredictable behavior.

This production is fantastic fun, a romp stuffed with brilliant language and some excellent slapstick. Wright has directed Hideous Portraits with intense discipline, and the actors perform their very exaggerated absurdist roles with relish and skill. This is an unpredictable production with a high level of nervous energy that not only challenges the audience but takes them along for the ride. There is an undercurrent of darkness in the play, which makes Hideous Portraits even sharper, but it avoids pathos and elects instead to occupy the dizzying world of hysteria, paranoia and mental agitation.

THE WALLS of La Mama Theatre are about to get a pounding. Local playwright Tom Wright has created three disgustingly self-absorbed male siblings, thrown them in a room together and turned on the Bunsen burner.

The oldest brother is a tyrannical genius novelist, returning to make the lives of his siblings hell. Wright, who also directs his play Hideous Portraits, describes this character as a cross between a mad little crab and Patrick White. "White had that ability to write postcards to people saying, 'You are vile, vile, vile,' " says Wright.

In Hideous Portraits, Melba and Moncrieff, both actors, have been rattling around their ancestral home ever since the death of their parents, watched over by a wall of family photographs. They are the privately educated younger sons of a hardworking quarrymaster but, unlike their pioneering pop, have settled for a lifestyle that will preserve their patrician views of the world.

Wright sees the brothers as remnants of a fading Anglo culture, the sort he saw too much of during his brief student days at Melbourne University. "You can hardly recognise the Australian accent with some people. They have this Hamlet-like hopelessness and are not doing much with their lives other than exist in their heads."

Wright draws parallels between this intellectual impotence and the stilted, "neck up" syndrome of much Australian theatre. "A lot of theatre in Australia is conceived, directed and performed from the neck up," he says. "Everything else is cut off, including our sexuality."

Within the pressure cooker context of a family gathering, Hideous Portraits investigates the repression of masculine sexuality in our culture and the decline of a once-celebrated mind. Inspired by the Thomas Bernhard play Ritter, Dene, Voss, Wright's language is energetic and the performing style non-naturalistic. Although the characters are reprehensible, it is hoped that the audience will find them entertaining.

Hideous Portraits runs from 11 to 29 June at La Mama. Bookings: 9347 6948.