Tron Theatre, Glasgow
Four Stars
In terms of what words
are worth, there’s a line from Annie Lennox’s anthem for independent women, No
More I Love You’s, that speaks volumes about New Zealand artists Julia Croft
and Nisha Madhan’s wild construction, first seen in Scotland at the 2017
Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Coming at the show’s climax, David Freeman and
Joseph Hughes’ Roland Barthes-referencing lyric is the perfect glam-tastic
evocation of the show’s tragi-comic plea, nay, demand for a new language and,
by default, a new way of being in a world run by macho bores.
Croft and Madhan take
their cue from post-beat pre-punk provocateur Kathy Acker, whose literary adventures
showed she too was no slouch in dissembling old clichés and lobbing fearless
linguistic grenades through sacred cow classics. This was laid bare in spades
throughout the recent large-scale retrospective of Acker’s work at the
Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The result of Croft and Madhan’s
efforts is a fifty-minute mash-up of live art cabaret, karaoke fantasy wish
fulfilment and a primer of taboo-busting fellow travellers, from Patti Smith to
Peaches.
With Croft crawling
onstage backwards, be-wigged and half dressed, a gymnastic display of microphone envy ensues,
before she attempts to get a word in edgeways or otherwise about matters of
gender. Trying identities on for size in Madhan’s production, Croft points up
all the mono-syllabic presumption of a patriarchy that wouldn’t recognise its
own ignorance if it attempted a square go with it, but still manages to come
out fighting and with a smile on her face.
It’s not that Croft and
Madhan don’t take themselves seriously. Quite the reverse, in fact, as this is fearlessly
deadly stuff. It’s just that they’re doing it for themselves in a way that also
makes for a riot of fun. As they take up the double-edged sword of the show’s title,
Power Ballad gives voice to those who might otherwise remain unheard, not as elegy,
but as a call to arms it’s okay to sing along with.
The Herald, September 13th 2019
ends
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