Flesh-Eating Tiger

He’s addicted to alcohol; she’s addicted to him.  That’s the tag line of Amy Tofte’s demanding ‘experimental’ text, which deliberately blurs what’s ‘real’ and what’s ‘a play’ – i.e. a play within a play – and a play within a play within another play…  If that sounds even potentially confusing, that’s okay: the confusion – or disorientation – is deliberate and in a sense the point of the exercise.  It’s the experience of being madly, deeply, obsessively in love even while knowing that this is a very bad idea and will end in tears or worse.

The Owl and Cat Theatre has chosen to revive – in altered form and with a new cast - their well received early 2015 production of Flesh-Eating Tiger, which was the first presentation of the theatre’s changed management.  

Current director (and co-owner of The Owl and Cat) Gabrielle Savrone has dropped a character (‘Blank Man’) and taken the play in what seems to be a more naturalistic direction.  This take on the text seems, unfortunately, to work against it.  Yes, the characters break the fourth wall and address the audience directly; yes, the characters speak as ‘themselves’ and then in the next scene as ‘characters’ in a play – and in the next as new characters in another play.  No lighting designer is credited, but the well plotted lighting changes certainly assist in the many transitions from scene to scene – and ‘real’ to play.

Ms Savrone’s cast - Amy Gubana (‘Woman’) and Marcus Molyneux (‘Man’) are attractive and committed performers: they work hard to make this work – although our engagement may be limited by noticing how hard they’re working or how hard they have to work.  It is as if they are somewhat boxed in by directorial decision.  Reviews of previous productions (in the US, at the Edinburgh Fringe and in Melbourne) all mention ‘comedy’ – ‘full of laughs’ said one - but there’s not much comedy – or relief - here: it’s flattened out by sincerity and a resistance towards ironic stylisation.

The ‘Woman’ character has left her marriage of eight years for the alcoholic ‘Man’ with whom she is obsessed – sexually but also drawn and held by his charm and the absurd hope that she can change him or even save him.  She also claims to be ‘writing’ the play as it proceeds – which implies that she is not in fact in control of it or of her emotions.  As the ‘Man’ says, how can she write it and live it at the same time?  Meanwhile he claims to be ‘directing’ the play, but he is no more in control than she is.  Both are disempowered, she by her obsessions and stubborn hopes, he by his self-doubt, pessimism and, of course, alcoholism. This is not at all ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’.  Via her non-linear form, her mix of styles – comedy, noir, melodrama, deliberately banal naturalism - Ms Tofte tries to put us inside the welter of lust, repulsion, hope, doubt, thwarted hope and rage.   

As she has said on her blog, ‘the play has a strong through-line, but only key chronological moments – and not all of them are based in reality’.  She claims an ‘emotional logic’ for the piece.  Yes it has one, but as you might infer, the text is, in a sense, fragile: it depends crucially on style and performance as an absolutely integral part of what it has to ‘say’ about life and that fraught area, ‘relationships’.  Play it straight and the flaws are visible.

A revealing departure from playing it straight comes late in the play.  In a kind of flash forward, Woman and Man are an old Jewish married couple, bickering but affectionate.  The rhythms are clear.  Should more or even all of the performances be in this mode?

‘Experimental’ can so often mean ‘no obligation to make sense’.  Flesh-Eating Tiger does make sense, but the sense it makes is, finally, limited – that is, as mere text.  Deprived of stylisation and the comedy that is embedded in the rhythms of the text, the play’s insights are blunted, and all its twists, turns, reversals and juxtapositions can’t disguise a feeling of repetition or at best variations on one emotional state.  Perhaps the problem lies in the decisions of director and cast to be ‘different’ in this revival of a previous success.

Michael Brindley