Theatre Review: The Problem with Evil
The Problem with Evil
Leon Ewing
PICA Performance Space
The political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" while covering the 1961 trial of the Nazi monster Adolf Eichmann.
At the risk of trivialising her insight, the problem with Perth audiovisual performance artist Leon Ewing's Fringe World show about evil is, also, its banality.
Dressed in black and wearing a half-death's head, Ewing has a polemic to advance, which he does with much finger and Power-pointing.
When he was in his element, he was very effective - notably in a clever and funny first scene with a demented, ocker, deep-sea creature puppet called Bruce, and in an almost nauseatingly powerful segment when we see UA175 smash through the South Tower again and again from all different angles while Ewing performs an entirely irrelevant "interpretive dance" in front of the screen.
But for much of the hour-long show he was far from that element, in particular in the long segments featuring a singularly ill-conceived and haltingly performed personification of evil called Catherine, an American lecture-tour merchant of the Al Gore variety whose favourite word seemed to be "um".
Ewing used Catherine to allow himself the indulgence of having a crack at his home State in the guise of an outsider. We've all enjoyed laughing at ourselves courtesy of well-researched visitors such as Barry Humphries and Wil Anderson, but Ewing's barbs were blunt and, frankly, irritating.
The indelicate liaison between Troy Buswell and Adele Carles, for example, may be many things, but a manifestation of evil it certainly isn't. The devastating fires in the Hills this past week may indeed have been triggered by weather patterns generated by Cyclone Yasi - but evil?
When it wasn't irrelevant, Ewing's parade of current affairs was neither funny nor insightful; worse, it patronised an audience who had heard and seen it all before. The show was a bit like having a 20-something show you some of his favourite YouTube clips - more often than not you've seen them dozens of times already.
Eventually, we even tire of our little mate Bruce, and all that's left is for Ewing to wrap up what he's trying to say to us. Which goes something like: "The only thing you can do to save the planet is to kill yourself and everyone you know. But you won't - because you're evil."
Like we needed to hear that.
