Brisbane Festival gets its ‘freak’ on with Gaultier revue
From a risqué Gaultier revue, to a new Australian opera and a Trent Dalton crowd pleaser, the 2024 program appeals to many different audiences.
Jean Paul Gaultier’s Fashion Freak Show erupts onto the stage in true bad-boy style: a posse of adult-sized teddy bears perform an energetic dance wearing Madonna-style, cone-shaped bras. They turn around and, in a theatrical sleight of hand, we realise the bears’ chests are actually their backs.
Through this exuberant routine, French fashion maverick Gaultier reveals he made his first conical bra not for Madonna’s 1990 Blonde Ambition tour, as is widely assumed, but for his teddy when he was a small child.
Equal parts burlesque, runway parade and musical revue, Fashion Freak Show is the international centrepiece of this year’s Brisbane Festival, and it features more bare bottoms, boobs, G-strings and BDSM outfits than anywhere this side of Paris’s Folies Bergere.
Gaultier directed and designed hundreds of eye-popping outfits for this arena-style production, which includes a potted biography of the ageing enfant terrible. It was first staged in 2019 in Paris and toured to other European capitals before touching down in Brisbane, in an Australian exclusive.
“It’s wild, it’s bold,’’ Brisbane Festival artistic director Louise Bezzina says of Fashion Freak Show – and she isn’t exaggerating. Bezzina says the show’s central theme – “The freak is chic”, as Gaultier puts it in a recorded video address – also informs her 2024 program, which spans three weeks and art forms ranging from contemporary opera to a mesmerising outdoor light and sound show.
This is Bezzina’s fifth festival. Under her tenure, Queensland’s biggest annual cultural event has solidified its reputation as one of Australia’s most significant and ambitious festivals. Bezzina says her lineup this year is “a celebration of difference, humanity and joy”, and an invitation to different audiences – whatever their gender, ethnicity, sexuality or social class – to “find your fit”.
Reflecting this theme, The No Bang Theory is an entertaining one-person show that uses classic musicals as a vehicle to question popular culture’s reductive depictions of autism, while the program’s fastest-selling work, Love Stories, a stage adaptation of the acclaimed Trent Dalton book, “explores love in all its guises’’, says Bezzina.
A new Torres Strait Islander musical, Straight from the Strait, has been reviewed on these pages, while the festival also featured the theatrical debut of Jonathan Mills’s new opera, Eucalyptus, which puts a feminist spin on Murray Bail’s 1998 Miles Franklin Award-winning novel about a grieving husband and doting father who turns his rural idyll into a kind of open-air prison for his only child. Still to come is Big Name, No Blankets, the hit rock musical about the rise of the Warumpi band, the musicians behind anthemic hits including My Island Home, and the first Aboriginal band to sing in language.
Every festival needs an epic and Bezzina found hers in Volcano, a four-part show from Ireland that combines dance and theatre with science-fiction and strains of Beckett. Meanwhile, after the sun sets, Lightscape transfigures Brisbane’s Botanic Gardens into a Tim Burton-esque night-time wonderland. Its 1.8km trail of sound and light installations includes an enchanted tropical forest, a cathedral of fairy lights and a vast field of digital wildflowers that change colour, as if on command from an invisible hand.
Bezzina admits that in the lead-up to the festival, she reached peak stress as the costumes and sets for her big international buy-in, Fashion Freak Show, were held up by an extraordinary chain of events. These included the Israel-Gaza conflict, shipping congestion in usually efficient Singapore, two strikes in Fremantle (“Two strikes!” she exclaims) and a storm.
“When those semi-trailers turned up the day before (opening night), I don’t think I have ever been so relieved in my life,’’ Bezzina tells The Australian.
French and Australian teams worked through the night to get Fashion Freak Show ready; even so, the opening night performance was delayed by an hour. Bezzina maintains that ultimately, “it was an absolutely spectacular opening. Brisbane was shining, everyone looked very glamorous”.
Fashion Freak Show features lots of simulated sex, expertly synchronised video screens, a cameo from French screen queen Catherine Deneuve, and a cheeky send-up of a snowy haired Karl Lagerfeld.
It also offers a playful nod to breakdancer Raygun’s kangaroo hops and a brief account of Gaultier’s life – from his childhood love of drawing, to his early battles with “the fashion police” who were outraged by his designs (and later pretended they weren’t) to dealing with paralysing grief as his lover and partner succumbs to AIDs.
The creative masterstroke of the man who once made women’s dresses out of plastic bags lies in his marriage of masculine, punk and fetishist styles with feminine materials including corsets, tutus, feathered headdresses, see-through ballgown hoops and even an off-the-shoulder velvet gown (with built-in trousers) for men. Extending the gender-bending theme, male models strut the runway in skirts, with one wearing two red fez hats as a bra.
Set to an upbeat pop, funk and disco soundtrack, the fashion parade includes a costume created in a collaboration between Gaultier and Cairns’s Grace Lillian Lee, who identifies as Torres Strait Islander, Chinese and European. Supported by Brisbane Festival, Lee travelled to France to work with the master and also has a related solo exhibition, The Dream Weaver, at the Brisbane Powerhouse.
This small but dazzling show draws on Lee’s cultural background and her long-established practice of merging fashion and art. The key elements are eight body sculptures and shields that combine TSI “grasshopper” weaving techniques and warrior-like forms with vibrant poster colours and modern materials including Perspex and mirrors. “It’s a really beautiful coming of age of Grace’s exquisite designs and aesthetic,’’ says Bezzina.
Even before it officially opened, Tim McGarry’s stage adaptation of Trent Dalton’s best-selling book, Love Stories, was shaping up to be “the biggest box office success of this festival”, says Bezzina. “It will sell out. There is no doubt about that.’’
She predicts that like 2021 festival hit Boy Swallows Universe, this show that breathes new life into the strangers’ love stories that Dalton collected and typed up on a sky-blue Olivetti typewriter in Brisbane’s CBD, will be “a landmark moment in our city’s theatrical history’’.
A co-production between the festival and Queensland Performing Arts Centre, Love Stories reunites the creative team behind the stage version of Boy Swallows Universe. Bezzina sat in on rehearsals and felt moved by the play’s depiction of many forms of love – among them a flash mob marriage proposal and a grandfather’s bewilderingly intense love for his grandchildren. She also admired “the truth-telling” by Dalton and his wife, Fiona Franzmann, who wrote additional dialogue for the characters known as Husband and Wife.
Bezzina says this show explores how Husband, the writer collecting the love stories, and his Wife reach “a point in the sand” in their own marriage. After many years together, she says they ask themselves: “Are we going to cross over, or not?’’
“I laughed during the show, and I cried,’’ Bezzina revealed, pointing out this is a moment many couples confront. “Fiona and Trent have done a remarkable job.”
This reporter attended a Love Stories preview, and director Sam Strong’s production, a poignant amalgam of dance, movement, dialogue, storytelling and live video, received a standing ovation. Dalton’s bond with his native city is something to behold – as he arrived at the Playhouse theatre and said hello to friends sitting behind him, audience members sitting further back burst into spontaneous applause.
Another Australian highlight at the Brisbane Festival was the new opera Eucalyptus, which has a complex, eclectic, often beautiful score by eminent Australian composer Jonathan Mills and a libretto by Meredith Oakes, whose lyrics are witty and imbued with a kind of crystalline economy.
Set in 1960s rural Australia, the opera plays out on a stage featuring period images of country life and two-storey silk screens printed with eucalypts.
Bezzina says “the cast is outstanding” – and it’s hard to disagree. Michael Gow’s skilful production is anchored by a luminous central performance by Desiree Frahn, who plays Ellen, a young woman who leads an isolated yet contented life with her widowed father (Simon Meadow) – until he cooks up a bizarre plan to marry her off to the first man who can name all the eucalypt species growing on their land. As Ellen feels the first stirrings of her feminist consciousness, an intriguing stranger turns up, bringing vivid tales of faraway places.
A tale of love, alienation and longing, this production features Opera Queensland’s chorus, who play Ellen’s townie male admirers and local gossips. The black-gloved and hatted Sprunt sisters capture the deep conservatism of their country town as they declare that no man who wears brogues (as Ellen’s father does) can be trusted. In dramatic terms, the opera’s second half doesn’t quite overcome the sense of statis inherent in Bail’s novel, which celebrates the art of narrative. Nonetheless, it is pleasing to know this incisive adaptation of Bail’s elegant fable will transfer to Victorian Opera in October.
Sitting comfortably under Bezzina’s “find your fit” banner is The No Bang Theory, the one-man show that deftly uses the musicals obsession of Gen Z writer-performer Oliver Hetherington-Page to challenge myths about “cute” autism. Rotating through a series of lorikeet-bright jackets, Hetherington-Page is a 26-year-old musicals nerd who is “surprisingly heterosexual”, on the spectrum and a virgin.
He is also a gifted singer and writer of biting satire who reckons shows such as The Big Bang Theory are maddening. He claims the award-winning sitcom makes its apparently autistic protagonist, Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons), the butt of every joke. And although Sheldon constantly says inappropriate things, he gets his girl.
In contrast, Hetherington-Page declares “there is no banging here … or, as Sheldon Cooper would say it, coitus’’. He has been longing for a girlfriend since he was an adolescent but the stars have never aligned for this young man who went to see Wicked 10 times and affects a Dame Edna-style sense of superiority towards his straight man accompanist, Tim Forrester.
None of this is to suggest The No Bang Theory is self-pitying. On the contrary, Hetherington-Page is an entertaining storyteller with an encyclopaedic knowledge of musicals and his solo show is, as the blurb promises, “packed with more banging show tunes than a night of karaoke.
Far more enigmatic is Volcano, a deeply philosophical mashup of dance, acting, sci-fi and invented television footage (think Stranger Things cross-pollinated with Star Trek, The Truman Show and Waiting For Godot) that unfurls in four discrete parts.
The show’s Irish creator, Luke Murphy, and co-star Ali Goldsmith are extraordinary dancers, evoking styles ranging from faux Egyptian, to 1940s musicals, disco and contemporary abstract choreography, and they segue between different genres with a sharpness that is astounding.
We first encounter the pair behind a wall of glass in a rundown living room with layers of peeling wallpaper: they have been sent into space in a sealed pod, and are part of an experiment to work out what makes us tick.
Volcano includes scenes and tableaux of sheer brilliance; the duo use simple props including a lamp and sofa to evoke famous historical images, including the man who stood in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square.
However, Murphy’s subject matter is so vast, parts of the narrative were hard to follow. Moreover, in the middle sections, there was too much choreographic repetition as the performers’ fitting bodies are assailed by unseen, Big Brother-like forces.
Running to almost four hours (including intervals) Volcano could benefit from a judicious trim and a more streamlined approach to its themes. Still, it is festival-worthy: one can only admire the ambition of a piece that interrogates the nature of humanity itself and reveals its performers as sublimely talented.
Rosemary Neill travelled to Queensland with the assistance of Brisbane Festival. The 2024 Brisbane Festival continues until September 21.
