EDGING - Theatre Review

WHAT: Edging
WHEN: 27 Nov - 1 Dec 2024
WHERE: Arts House (The Warehouse)
CREATED & PERFORMED BY: Sammaneh Pourshafighi and Eden Falk
DIRECTED BY: Lara Thoms
DESIGNED BY: Kate Baxter (KB) and Lara Thoms
LIGHTING BY: Jenny Hector
SOUND BY: Tilman Robinson
VIDEO BY: d duan

Sammaneh Pourshafighi and Eden Falk - photo by Gregory Lorenzutti

Aphids is something of an institution these days, and they have been doing the thing they do under the artistic leadership of Lara Thoms and Mish Grigor since 2019. They have been incredibly prolific and developed what is absolutely a signature look, feel, and interrogation of ideas which is immediately recognisable. One of the newest inclusions to their repertoire is Edging which opened at Arts House this week.

One of the signature elements of Aphids productions is they gather people who are interesting and build shows around those people and their experiences and social impact. One of the truly great examples of that was their show A Singular Phenomenon which predates this leadership team, but Thoms was a co-creator and in this iconic event lies the seeds of Thoms' creative process absolutely. You can see the distinctive elements coming through in the repeating repertoire including shows such as The Director and Exit Strategies for example.

Edging is technically co-created by Sammaneh Pourshafighi and Eden Falk but Thoms' direction comes through clearly. I find myself wondering how two such diverse artists came together to create this show and I suspect Thoms is the answer. Pourshafighi is a cross form artist, a 42 year old, gender fluid Iranian refugee who was once interrogated by Border Security for hours (an entire night), which must have been terrifying and exhausting. Falk is an actor who, for three years, did the voice overs for the TV show Border Security International.

Across 70 minutes Pourshafighi gets to work out her trauma by interrogating Falk as the proxy white cis-male institutional patriarchy. Initially it is just Falk in the space with a suitcase a conveyor belt and a double row of video monitors arrayed high upstage. Pourshafighi's voice (Big Brother style) commands him to start the conveyor belt and inspect items from the suitcase. They are innocuous including thongs, a bag of dirty underwear, a roll of toilet paper. Along the way Pourshafighi tells us a bit about themself and their experience under interrogation. Sneakily the theme music from the TV show Border Security becomes evident and we learn about Falk's connection to the themes of the show. There is even a super cute dog who joins us for a while to play the iconic sniffer dog in the TV show. Awwww.

Pourshafighi and Falk are always themselves although the entire show shifts around them role-playing, and their stories are interspersed with games played with the audience. Along the way issues of exclusion, authority, and domination are explored. Power is the question of the show. Who holds the power on stage and in the story telling? Whose stage is it? What power does the audience have even in participation moments. Who will win the greco-roman wrestling? Who holds the keys to doors - border control, entry to Berghain? 

The show starts slowly although the Big Brother idea is quick off the mark. Unfortunately, the introduction lingers too long in Pourshafighi's self-deprecation about her 'funny' voice which creates a weird dissonance of this being the voice of power. Perhaps that is the point. I don't know because I don't think their voice is odd. There was also this commentary about 'Daddy Australia' which didn't resonate with me at all because I have never heard anyone refer to Australia as daddy. I may be being too literal here and this is probably a synonym for the patriarchy and BDSM, but I can't see it catching on. 

Once Pourshafighi is on stage with Falk and the Border Security stuff starts to be explored Edging become really strong, but I feel like this is mostly a result of Falk's incredible skills as an actor. The show comes to be about him and his experiences and regretted complicity in the Australian Governments extreme border policies when offshore detention became entrenched in our nasty and cruel refugee response. I wanted it to be more about Pourshafighi and I wanted some honesty and vulnerability from them.

There is powerful stuff in this show and I really wanted to be allowed to sit in it and feel the horror of being denied your 'gayness' because you don't know who Bette Midler is or anything about Greco-Roman wrestling. Who in Australian DOES know anything about Greco-Roman wrestling for goodness' sake? I wanted to process the lengths the government went to in order to produce film content only aired in other countries to deter them from considering Australia as a refugee destination. I wanted to absord the idea that content was created without credits to ensure the privacy of (protect?) the people who made the work. Who ever heard of a film without credits? 

Unfortunately, the ideas get side-tracked with the game playing. A memory game is played with a diorama of the Berghain club in Berlin. You had to answer questions about this tiny diorama in order to enter but it was impossible to see the tiny details so we couldn't win. The metaphor would have been stronger if I (or my plus one) had known anything about the Berghain. The concept holds but I think the reference is too obscure if this is meant to resonate with a broader audience. 

The show also has a pace problem. It is constructed in segments. I think they are meant to represent wrestling bouts because the performers seem to always pause and reset before beginning the next section. They are kind of the black outs you have if you are telling yourself, you are not having a black out show. 

My issue is not the construct per se, but it makes it all so slow and measured and it is too easy to tune out, especially if you aren't following all the threads being laid out. By the end of the show my plus 1 was completely tuned out and I was struggling to care anymore. What I did love, though was the self-interrogation towards the end, which is one of the signature features of Aphids shows. Good questions are asked of the performers about their complicity and performative self-interests. The kind of questions which are always implicit in all art.

This brings me a full circle back to the Aphid's signature. Aphids work is always billed as experimental, but I wonder if, after all these years, and with what is now quite clearly a creative formula, you can actually use that word legitimately? If you consider that the set for Edging is almost identical to the set for The Director, and they generally favour a white box set anyway, and the self-interrogative element dates back through works such as Exit Strategy for example, and their oeuvre is to bring apparently disparate characters together who share an experience in an unexpected way, what experimentation is actual taking place anymore? 

This is not to say that Edging isn't important or powerful. It is more of a question about when does the new and different just become the ordinary and mainstream? I also want to flag the danger of what was once fresh and exciting becoming staid and rote if you are not constantly alert and genuinely self-interrogating - not just being performative about it. Having said that, Aphids audiences love what Aphids do so from a sustainability point of view I can't deny a winning formula. This is definitely a theatrical style very much supported in Melbourne at this point is history and that is to be celebrated.

I don't deny Edging did not blow me or my plus one away, but it was intriguing and insightful in places, and fun along the way. Also, a lot of the audience come out saying they loved everything about it so go ahead and give it a try. It might just be the best thing you see this year.

3.5 Stars