Theatre review: Class Act
This highly-entertaining reconstruction (and deconstruction) of My Fair Lady takes comedic and confessional detours through artist Mish Grigor’s life, landing the show’s class commentary squarely on Australian shores.
In the 1964 film My Fair Lady, Eliza Doolittle (whose surname is shockingly on the nose) goes from dirt-poor flower seller to convincing a party full of rich people that she, also, is rich.
In her life, Mish Grigor goes from a scrubby bogan teenagehood in Western Sydney to eating at the Ottolenghi restaurant in London (and, tangentially, becoming an artist).
These two trajectories hum along in parallel in APHIDS’ Class Act, which comes to Vitalstatisix’s Waterside Workers Hall by way of a recent UnWrapped season at the Sydney Opera House.
In the work, Grigor inhabits a double and sometimes triple-layered “I” persona, switching between and blending Eliza and herself, while also providing occasional meta-commentary.
Loosely driven by a retelling of the film, the show’s true animus is a search to spotlight the actual absurdity of class structures and signifiers; to rip them out of their polite cloaking into the open so we can all laugh glibly (because what else are we, the experimental-theatre-going middle class, to do?) about how something so genuinely silly squeezes the potential out of so many lives.
Taken into other hands, Class Act’s script could easily present as a well-researched conceptual stand-up comedy show. But Grigor’s enormous charisma, which seems to sheet off her in beatific waves, combines with a strong core of highly-strategic physicality and a suite of performance-art elements to create layers of meaning well beyond what is said.
Class Act is a highly entertaining retelling of My Fair Lady. Photo: Yael Stempler
Grigor is joined on stage by contemporary dancer Alice Dixon, whose comedic timing is no less profound than her co-star’s, and the pair are directed by Zoey Dawson. Together, the trio wields devices like a grating “incorrect” buzzer noise and the vast distance between actor and dancer’s physical capacity as weaponry to slice through class stratifications.
The most effective of these elements is probably a handful of highly repetitive sequences. This kind of repetition requires those on stage to have a strong stomach for audience discomfort, but Grigor holds the line and pushes past the point of frustration and into a territory more often occupied by durational performance artists. After enough repetition, we begin to identify with the physical extremes Grigor is imposing on herself – an effective and visceral metaphor for the hollow and violent struggle up the class ladder.
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Staged on a brightly-lit, minimally-raised round podium sheathed in sheer purple and lavender curtains, Class Act’s aesthetic is reassuringly far away from the DIY-look more often associated with experimental theatre. That this, too, begins to feel like its own joke on, and critique of, the art world and art audiences is a testament to how effectively the piece turns its lens around.
While definite in its desire to grapple with the ways Britain’s class structure has been inherited by Australia, the piece is careful not to be weighed down by didacticism. Instead, it is very, very funny and uses punchlines to accessibly critique the layers of social veneer we pretend not to notice as we live among them every day. This approach, by necessity, results in some skating over the top of things – early allusions to the way capitalism relies on our dedication to class striving, for example, fade quickly away.
Despite having to forego these explorations, Grigor’s chosen approach of humour and vulnerability is a far more effective and far more generous way of conducting this conversation.
Class Act is showing at the Waterside Workers Hall until Saturday, September 28.