Review: Death's Waiting Room

Contributed by Joyce Chau     

Oct 19 2005

Composer Tim Hansen

Death’s Waiting Room is an eclectic mix of theatre, music, comedy and circus. It takes the freak show as its premise and plays to our age-old desire for the perverse. While there’s enough sex, blood, guts to outrage the moral majority (if there is such a thing), Death’s Waiting Room has a strong morality of its own.

A troupe of actors, a collection of freaks put on the show. Roll up! Roll up! As always the credibility of a freak show depends on the variety of the flesh on display. In this one there’s one grotesquely fat clown and one grotesquely thin clown, a mermaid in a bath tub, whores to cater for every fetish, acrobats with bodies that contort and bend. The Ringmaster presides over the spectacle, the expert, the one who knows all and knows what’s best for his collection of freaks. Nevertheless, the troupe wants to do things differently and takes things into their own hands. The results are far from your usual family fairground outing. 

The freaks bicker over the parts they will play in each scene. They bitch and bait one another as they rehearse. Each freak is bitter about one thing or another and the competition within the troupe is particularly vicious. Some really have been hard done by, others just whinge. Yet they must nevertheless get on with it. While the characters may be sideshow freaks, they are about more than their weird physiques. The power dynamics of the group are played out in each petty squabble. 

That the troupe is a dark metaphor for life and society and the Ringmaster a god-like figure coolly removed from all the action isn’t extraordinary. There’s the sense that humanity is a disturbing, uncontrollable and dangerous thing, which isn’t all that surprising either given some of the content of the play. What was more unusual was that the play derived a moral position from these elements and from the sense of futility. Inaction and non-interference becomes a strange sort of moral high ground.

The scenes in Death’s Waiting Room are as diverse as the cast playing them out, ranging from extreme physical theatre to moments where there is nothing but the spoken word. There’s also a good dose of self-deprecating humour and a Shakespearian blood bath (a case of taking Shakespeare to the literal extreme!)    

Toby Finlayson’s timing as Fat Clown is impeccable. Likewise, Kate Clugston’s spiteful Strawberry, the mermaid. 

Tim Hansen’s music is the highlight of Death’s Waiting Room, though the choreography in some of the musical numbers could’ve been sharper. 

Directed By: Danielle Harvey

Cast: Liam Nesbitt, Matt Gaskin, Blair Milan, Toby Finlayson, Sasha Cody, Kate Clugston, Danielle Connor, Amy Firth, Fiona Rishworth, Phil Hassan

Season: PACT Theatre, 107 Railway Pde, Erskineville until 5 November 2005. www.dancinggiant .com.au