Dirty Pictures

Company: A Room to One Side
Venue: Collingwood Underground Theatre, Melbourne
Dates: to 23 October 2011

Hidden in the deep recesses of Collingwood Underground Theatre beats the heart of pure independent performance. It's a cold and barren underground carpark, the stage hidden by gates and the performance space yawning back into darkness. Everything about it is eerie and evocative, from the cold cement floor, to the heavily graffitied walls. Whatever happens promises to be profound.

Sadly, Dirty Pictures is not. It tries, bless it, it really tries very hard to create an impact, and for sure there is a potential message there, but it is lost among repetition, tedium and a long, long silence. It has a cast of four characters and through 134 short scenes the actors produce same dark tableaus of what can happen in the twisted world of sex, violence and intravenous drugs.

There is no dialogue in the play. This has the potential to be quite confronting, but somewhere along the way it misses the mark. What is not being said is nowhere near as powerful as what could be said. In additions to this, for some reason a handful of televisions are scattered around the stage with obscure images on them; montages of random scenes that are obnubilated by a particularly obnoxious voiceover.

It has to be acknowledged though, that the acting is superb. None of the characters are given names, presumably to add to their drug fuelled anonymity, but each performance is very strong. Simone Smith looks dirty and starved as the woman who itches for her next fix, endangering her life by going to a dangerous dealer and haunting street corners for shared needles. Rain Fuller brings her character, the prostitute, alive with her raw sexuality and a brazen thirst for heroin. The only thing that distracts from Fuller's performance is the script's unexplained need to have her repeatedly pull her clothes off. Cory Corbett and Benedict Kazlauskas are both intimidating and devoid of emotion as the prospective pimps/dealers. They play characters that have no soul and no love for the people around them.

And yet, all of this could be neatly summarised in a ten minute play. The length of Dirty Pictures is over done and drags on to the point of boredom. One hundred and thirty four scenes stretch out and out until audience members started to get up and leave. And the obscurity of it seems to have little meaning, despite writer/director Tony Reck's attempts to explain it. “That this reference can apply to the streets and communities of Melbourne is and indictment; one indicating the terminal failure of a society unwilling to concede that the fragmented self is not entrenched within mainstream life.” It's explanations like this that leave the impression of a garbled high school performance, with all the all the attempted depth and meaning of a VCE philosophy class.

Give this one a miss, but keep your eye on Collingwood Underground Theatre. Dirty Pictures may not deliver, but the promise of genuine Australian performance is hidden within these walls.   

Corina Thorose