There’s something apt about a circus company mounting a show about the grinding repetition of modern life; circus as an art form is in constant flux between expectation and surprise, between stultifying familiarity and the possibility of genuine innovation. Perpetual Frustration Machine is, according to its program material, a work that explores Lacan’s thoughts on the Freudian concept of the “death drive”, that tendency in human nature that wishes to undo connections and destroy things in its pursuit of personal desire. Circus is so often associated with the frivolous and the ephemeral that it’s quite refreshing to see it utilised in the service of something more profound. Whether the actual result is profound is another question.
Director Zebastian Hunter has collaborated with playwright Stephen Sewell on this, and they’ve produced a true hybrid piece, where text and movement vie and interact with each other, where the discrete theatrical forms merge and smash against each other in interesting, if ultimately inconsequential, ways. Sometimes, productions that are not quite theatre, not quite circus and not quite dance can coalesce into truly genre-defying work, but sometimes hybridity is merely monstrous.
It opens with the four performers at seperate stations, immersed in an action of some kind, from yoga exercises to domestic duties. A robotic, digitalised voice commands them to “change” every minute or two, and so they do, in a never-ending and rapidly increasing loop of pointless actions. It’s the hamster wheel writ large, and the central point of this show. Sewell is a writer who’s capable of a fantastically fevered register – I can’t think of any other Australian playwright who better employs the political tract as a poetic device – but his text here often feels laboured and repetitive. Those Lacanian ideas are whittled down to the most banal of truisms.
Hunter’s direction doesn’t help: he encourages his performers to ham ideas that are self explanatory; he reaches for a surreal register that comes off as merely silly; and he draws painfully obvious parallels between the word and the action. At one point, a performer uses the Cyr wheel as a direct metaphor for the merry-go-round of living, with audio text to reinforce the idea as if the visual meaning weren’t enough. This isn’t just overkill, it’s intellectual mutton dressed as lamb.
The performers themselves are at their most convincing when they are in the pocket of their particular skill set. Seth Scheuner’s aerial work is gorgeous and arresting, and Stephanie Benson is consistently powerful in her acrobatics. Debra Batton and Adam O’Connor-McMahon demonstrate great control and precision throughout, but neither they nor their fellow performers are natural actors. The dialogue, already heightened and supernatural, comes across in the delivery as turgid and didactic.
There are moments of inspiration: the sequence, more powerful for the fact that it’s unexplained, of Batton walking over crushed jewels like they are an ancient rite; a character climbing into, and eventually out of, an oven in a defiant twist on the mythology surrounding Sylvia Plath; the final image of the performers suspended on swings, first forward facing and finally in reverse. These are all indications of a work that at least attempts to dive into deep theoretical fissures; if it doesn’t emerge with any viable dramatic effect, then at least it was lost in the pursuit of something grand. You can’t really ask much more of art, and we’ve all asked for very much less of circus. Perpetual Frustration Machine may stumble, but it’s a path worth walking.
