Some cultures take their clowning very seriously. The French claim to have invented mime, even if it drew heavily on the Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte. Before them were the Greeks, who favoured highly structured set pieces involving witty word play and rousing songs. In this country, we tend towards the crass end of the clowning stick, content to rely largely on swearing and scatology for our laughs. But occasionally some clowns in the European tradition pop up down under. Meet Jim and Barb. Barb and Jim.
Created by Clare Bartholomew and Daniel Tobias – most famous as the duo behind Euro-style pop parody group Die Roten Punkte – Barb and Jim are a couple of septuagenarians preparing to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary, if only they can get through their day first. It starts with the morning ablutions, which mainly consist of Jim going to the toilet every minute and a half – who says you can’t have high quality clowning and copious poo jokes? – then onto breakfast of dry biscuits and tea. There are predictable issues with false teeth and hearing aids.
It’s only when Jim goes shopping for party supplies and confronts what seems like a nuclear fallout (presumably the extreme effects of climate change), his face now red raw from the environmental conditions outside, that we get any sense of a bigger picture, of anything beyond the grotesquery of ageing at the centre of the show. And yet, it’s an idea that isn’t fully developed: the mimed party guests aren’t suffering from this climate catastrophe, and the couple themselves remain oblivious to it. Maybe this is deliberate, a sly criticism of baby boomers and their burden of blame; but if so, it’s sketchily delivered and lacking in any satirical bite.
Far better is the sheer nuttiness of the characterisations, the delight in the body horror of old age and the increasingly violent reactions to petty irritants in a long marriage. Barb and Jim are for the most part adorable and loving, but they can morph into hateful and then murderous in an instant – rather like Tweety Bird turning into a monster in the famous 1950 Warner Bros cartoon, Hyde and Go Tweet. When the couple are given a set of knives as a present, we just know they’ll be put to gruesome use. Especially after we’ve seen what Jim can do with a dead rat, a dove and a bunny rabbit.
The Anniversary, under the direction of Peter Houghton – who also devised the piece along with the performers – has the good sense to push at the boundaries of bad taste, and there is a welcome anarchism to its moods and pacing. Where it struggles is with its structural architecture and its length. Those Warner Bros cartoons, which it emulates in a number of ways, only went for five or six minutes, and at a little over an hour, this show has a few longueurs. Repetition is a handy comedic tool, but if it doesn’t build or escalate or even undermine a narrative, it risks a flatlining of the laughs.
That said, there are a few sequences that are outrageously funny. One occurs early, when Barb is dishing out the meds and forgets how much she’s taken. There was once an elderly gentleman who danced the night away in Melbourne’s gay clubs, who people nicknamed Grandpa Acid: this is what Grandma Acid would have looked like, bobbing to a beat of her own making, and it’s worth the price of the ticket alone. The other sequence involves those previously mentioned knives, along with an umbrella and a radio antenna, and it’s a stabby sensation.
The Anniversary isn’t perfect, but it does provide a solid showcase for the particular talents of Bartholomew and Tobias, who communicate largely through their bodies – the show is basically silent, the only words spoken being Barb and Jim – in ways that deliberately evoke that tradition of European clowning, but who also lend it an unmistakably Australian flavour, a wildness and irreverence. In lieu of a return of Die Roten Punkte’s Otto and Astrid, Barb and Jim will do just fine.
