THEATRE
LADY EATS APPLE ★★½
Back to Back Theatre, Hamer Hall
Until October 13
The mavericks at Geelong-based Back to Back Theatre have built a reputation as not just one of our most exciting theatre companies, but the world's leading ensemble of actors with and without disability.
![Scott Price, Sarah Mainwaring, Mark Deans and Brian Lipson in the disappointing Lady Eats Apple.](/web/20161116193806im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/y/k/p/t/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gry3hm.png/1476061266578.jpg)
It is a reputation well deserved, with work such as Small Metal Objects, Ganesh Versus The Third Reich and Super Discount achieving devised performance notable for its striking originality, subversive humour, and fearless confrontational style.
So when I express disappointment at Lady Eats Apple, it's from a vantage point of perilously high expectations.
![Mark Cuthbertson's design has sweeping scale and ingenuity, but overall Lady Eats Apple is underdeveloped, with a hole ...](/web/20161116193806im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/y/k/l/9/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gry3hm.png/1476061266578.jpg)
From before it begins, you know the show will test your comfort zone. The audience must squeeze through what's effectively an inflatable airlock to reach a seating bank constructed in a womb-like space.
The first part of this strange triptych takes us back to Book of Genesis via meta-theatrical comic deflation. Unprepossessing technical staff morph into a self-doubting God (Scott Price) and a placatory figure (Brian Lipson) – perhaps Satan before the Fall – who tries half-heartedly to bolster his confidence.
It's a double vision: they're also performers in rehearsal – the psychological experience of disability rubbing against well-meaning, and uncomprehending, condescension.
God becomes a kind of Wizard of Oz, creating the world through vocal manipulation and projection. A prelapsarian Adam (Mark Deans) and Eve (Sarah Mainwaring), not knowing why they're not supposed to eat forbidden fruit, naturally do so; the scene derailed as Satan has an existential crisis, amid phone calls from his demanding wife, and tries to provoke God into euthanising him.
![Mark Deans, Scott Price, Simon Laherty, Romany Latham, Brian Lipson and Sarah Mainwaring in the final act of Lady Eats Apple.](/web/20161116193806im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/y/k/l/g/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gry3hm.png/1476061266578.jpg)
The show's major problem arrives after a spectacular design reveal introduces a long sequence which I assume was supposed to invoke some sort of hallucinatory, Castellucci-like visual theatre, but which just has us sitting in the dark listening to soporific electronica for 20 minutes, with indistinct shadows appearing right at the end to no particular effect.
The missing link makes a third and final reveal look decorative, and blunts the impact of what follows. You can draw resonances between the opening scene and the last – a romance between cleaners carried out behind the back of a self-important disability worker (Romany Latham) – on an intellectual level, but they're not fully manifest theatrically.
Mark Cuthbertson's design has sweeping scale and ingenuity, and director Bruce Gladwin does create moments that hover unsettlingly between the mythic and the ordinary. Still, compared with much of Back to Back's work, Lady Eats Apple is underdeveloped, with a hole in the middle.