Lawn
Malthouse Theatre
March 11 – 14, 2009.

Lawn‘s is a world that lingers between reality and the unreal. There is a foreboding, an eeriness that sends shivers up your spine; cockroaches crawl out of faces, parasites are ripped from bodies and a man is glad-wrapped from head to toe.

The production, presented by Splintergroup – a contemporary dance company of independent performers, designers and artists – was first developed in Berlin in 2001, and completed in Australia at Brisbane Powerhouse in 2004. It now travels to Melbourne’s Matlhouse Theatre as a part of the Dance Massive Festival.

As the audience enters, three men – Vincent Crowley, Grayson Milwood and Gavin Webber – are dressed in suits, going about their daily routine on stage. Milwood sits, nonchalant, as he clips his toenails on top of the dining table. Webber stands off to the right looking thoughtful, while Crowley obsessively dusts a bookshelf. The piece is set is a large room, and at the top of the walls the wallpaper is coming away to reveal underneath layers.

Lawn comes from a personal place for the performers, who created the piece while enduring the harsh Berlin winter, homesick for Australia. One day they peeled back the wallpaper of their house to find a painted swastika. The work is about layers and the history contained within our walls, floors and furniture.

The first hint of hyperreality strikes, taking the audience with horrified surprise, when Milwood covers his face with his hands, only to have cockroaches crawl out from between his fingers and run down his arms. The moment disappears into a scene of normalcy as Crowley, the clean freak of the three, chases the cockroaches with his shoe.

Lawn is a work of illusion; the craft of the performance is in the men’s’ ability to create a hyperreality that is as believable as the reality. Through the soundtrack, lighting and intelligent choreography, the work constantly moves between alternate realities, occasionally hanging in the balance. Classical violin, and later an accordion, accompanies the everyday scenes (played live, the musicians concealed by the set), whereas heavy metal is matched with wilder, more desperate dance solos.

The performers’ movements are energetic and rhythmic; all three are athletic and smooth in their transitions onto and off the floor. Milwood climbs, spider-like, up the walls of the room – a web of glad wrap revealed below. There is a collective inhale from the audience as they witness the spider’s calculated, yet risky fall from the top of the set. He is captured and cocooned in the thin plastic sheet below.

The feeling of all this is claustrophobia; the men are trapped within a room, literally crawling the walls, in an uncomfortable craziness. The audience can’t help but feel trapped with them.

It is open to interpretation as to whether these are three men in a room or possibly three different aspects of one man. Milwood and Crowley are shadowy; sometimes they are characters, sometimes ghost-like presences, and sometimes insects.

While the subject matter is serious, this work is at times comical, peppered with tongue-in-cheek attitude. Chuckles from audience members ensue throughout, and there are also some real laugh-out-loud moments. But other times the audience sits on edge of their seats in discomfort.

A fight scene towards the end is a highlight. It is fast-paced and tightly choreographed – Webber is beaten by Milwood and Crowley, using a chair and table. The beauty of this aggressive attack is that the performers do not try to make it look authentic; the blows do not connect and there is no attempt to make it seem as if they do. It is an artful bashing, but a risky one also. Seeing Webber post-performance, he has war wounds to prove it – he sports a black eye from the night before, and admits he was kicked in the head during an earlier performance.

The only point of criticism is the abrupt ending. Although a solace is achieved, the ending is rather the beginning of another tangent of the work.

All in all, though, Lawn is a wonderful production. For those who enjoy a little spine-tingling horror, mixed with excellent stagecraft and strong imagery, and even a little humour, this is for you. It is a highly physical, fast-paced, intelligent performance that will suck you into its world and keep you in enjoyable discomfort, somewhere between the normal and the not so normal.