Theatre / Low Pay? Don’t Pay! by Dario Fo, translated by Joseph Farrell and directed by Cate Clelland. At Canberra Rep Theatre, until December 6. Reviewed by ARNE SJOSTEDT.
It’s reasonable to state Low Pay? Don’t Pay! is a thinking-person’s experience – or it will make you one.
Under Cate Clelland’s direction, the show tumbled on to the Canberra Rep stage like a bulldozer, shifting dirt and smashing obstacles. With a cast that felt committed and engaged in the dramatic work of deconstruction, it had impact. And the landscape on stage felt fundamentally different by the end of the play.
Originally known to English-speaking audiences as Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!, Dario Fo’s classic farce retains its biting humour while sharpening its relevance for today’s economic struggles.
Powerfully carried forward by a charismatic performance from Lachlan Abrahams as Joe, this show succeeded in delivering the script honestly and intelligently. This was aided and abetted in no small part by the hilarious pairing of Maddie Lee and Chloe Smith as Toni and Maggie, and the refreshing addition of Rowan McMurray as Lou.
This play doesn’t give you much chance to settle in and feel comfortable. It tackles the desperate ingenuity of ordinary people facing rising prices and economic injustice, and the almost hopeless plight of the less fortunate. Matching this, the aesthetic felt deliberately rough-edged, thrown together, a little make-do. There was a sense of things being not quite good enough, echoing the lives at the heart of the story.
There was a restless energy in Joseph Farrell’s translation of Fo’s comic script that moved from idea to idea, leaping rapidly from one comic crisis to the next. As a result, the continual work of keeping up with this entertaining farce opens the interpretive faculties and draws you into its complicated rhetoric of struggle and humanity.
Food for the mind and spirit rather than the stomach, this production shows that Fo’s lean, mean tale still belongs on a modern stage.
Leave a Reply