There are two types of people in this world: witless arts critics — and those who love Ben Elton's GASP!
GASP! has just closed an all-but sell-out season in Perth and has opened at Brisbane's QPAC as Queensland Theatre Company's last hurrah of a very successful 2014.
Elton — comedian, author, playwright, actor and director — has reworked his 25-year-old play for a 'new century and new country'. It deals with big (mega, transglobal, obscene profits-type big) business and hot-button topics of mineral resources and pollution.
The world is running out of rocks and oil, so market forces and the craving for profits dictate that big business should monopolise the air we breathe — capture it and sell it back to us hosed down with a healthy serving of corporate marketing.
Perhaps a far-fetched concept when the play was originally staged in 1990, which starred Hugh Laurie and the voice of Stephen Fry, but not so much since 2005 when the Nestlé Chairman, in all seriousness, raised the spectre of privatising water!
GASP! is a comedy and undeniably Elton. Look no further than Steven Rooke as Sandy, the greasing yes man, very much cut from the [womanising Blackadder role of ] Lord Flashheart cloth — woof! It brutally isolates many and varied ideas and stereotypes: Politicians and industrialists are all obvious, fair game — but who'd suspect "the femos at the ABC" would get a namecheck!?
Opening night's performance started somewhat coolly — I'd need a second showing to locate the missing ingredient. Ten minutes in, however, and cast and audience were away — as the plot to monopolise the world with 'Suck and Blow' air purifiers was hatched. All five players were well cast and didn't disappoint; and by conclusion, the deliberately vacuous characters, save for moral compass of Lucy Goleby's 'Peggy', had weaved a colourful and credible caricature of what singular corporate greed could, and perhaps does, look like.
If pushed to nominate a standout I'd select Damon Lockwood's Phillip — but one has to acknowledge he had the greater breadth of material with which to work.
Director Wesley Enoch was also very much in the house: video walls, thematic music, and an imposing tower of Suck and Blow machines. Set changes were effortless (on pulleys) and I can't imagine he played no part in the often confronting humour which oscillates between schoolboy and dark and back again. "Aboriginals owned Australia, and now they don't — what's the problem?" Get the idea?Younger audiences have, and will, respond well to GASP. It's politically and socially relevant, presents easy to digest characters and narratives, all delivered with Elton's trademark, blunt instrument humour.
But that's not to say the instrument hasn't been well crafted and cast from the finest materials — and this is the point lost on the play's few hapless detractors. Elton is wasted on critics — certainly on the hackneyed, common or garden arts variety who have panned this production. Too much intellectual suck and blow for their own good, I'd hazard. But none of this is new to Elton: He won '2003 Theatregoers' Choice Award' for 'Best New Musical' for 'We Will Rock You', again after it was critically panned. Watchwords for writers there are theatregoers, choice and award.
Elton and Enoch could sell as many novels and tv programmes, win as much acclaim as they please, and fill houses from here to The Big Apple; but these limited scribes will never mark a work of GASP's ilk well.
We are fortunate, then, that Enoch can adapt from the likes of the critically-acclaimed Black Diggers to the publicly-embraced GASP and be home in time for tea, while the witless are having the jokes explained — and for the gags they do understand, remain blissfully unaware of their huge appeal beyond their own intellectual ennui.
FEATURE: We spoke with Ben Elton at length a few weeks ago..
If you're after (another) slick execution of richly developed, yet ultimately flawed, characters sculpted by life's tapestry, GASP! is not for you. For a memorable, entertaining, caustic romp dabbling in a topical issue, grab a friend or three and see this.
3 and a half suck and blows/ 5
The Queensland Theatre Company and Black Swan State Theatre collaboration plays until 7th December at QPAC.
