‘These actors’ walls are down, although admittedly the walls in their stories are usually low.’ Keith Gow reviews post’s Ich Nibber Dibber
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing
Three women appear floating in darkness, draped in white. Flashes of light give them an ethereal air. As the bright lights focused on the audience fade down, the vision of the women comes into focus. They are posed like classical Greek statues.
These women are Natalie Rose, Mish Grigor and Zoe Coombs Marr of the feminist performance art group, post. And they are here to talk shit, both metaphorical and scatological.
post have been creating theatre for over a decade and over the years Nat, Mish and Zoe have had long discussions about their lives, as friends do. As part of their theatre-making process, they decided to record these conversations. Ich Nibber Dibber, now on at Malthouse Theatre, is an attempt to make some sense of their recurring questions, consternations and obsessions.
The show is 70 minutes of proof that sometimes we run out of things to say, but that doesn’t stop us from talking – especially to our best friends. Nothing is off limits: we get poo stories, puke stories, deliberation over their messy love lives, conjoined twins and dry vaginas. These actors’ walls are down, although admittedly the walls in their stories are usually low and someone is getting fingered on them.
We bounce from Mish to Natalie to Zoe, the stories unspooling chronologically over 15 years. We follow Natalie from singleness to marriage to pregnancy and motherhood as Mish bounces from boy to boy to boy. And we have Zoe, a lesbian, talking about disrupting hetero-norms while having the longest, most stable relationship of all three.
Early on during the performance I attended, a couple – a man and a woman – walked out of the theatre. I wondered what made them leave, whether it was the focus on bodily waste or the fact that early on, the piece seems shapeless and messy. Could it have been that they weren’t used to hearing women speak like this, or weren’t willing to listen, to hear them out?
A lot of current discourse is about listening to marginalised groups, hearing their stories to understand their experiences. If there is a discussion about equality, listen to those who suffer inequality. If there is a discussion about racism, let those who are victims of hate speech or vilifying cartoons talk about how they feel. And the #metoo movement is all about listening to women.
In Ich Nibber Dibber, post is making it clear that the usual narrative is embodied by John Berger quote above – men act and women appear– and they aren’t interested in it. Nat, Mish and Zoe do appear, but also literally act or re-enact their theatre-making process. Although they sit and recline as if objects in a museum, by speaking to us on their own terms the women disrupt the conventional expectations.
As Hannah Gadsby said in her recent Netflix special Nanette, centuries of art have been defined by male artists painting women as “flesh vases for their dick flowers”. post are the subjects of their own art and not the objects of a male artist or the male gaze; even as we watch them, they are in control.
I thought again about the couple who left early. I wondered what they talked about when they left, what impression they had of the first 15 minutes of Ich Nibber Dibber. Most of all, I wondered what they might have thought if they had stayed. Might they have recognised the show’s request for them to really listen?
The formal poses of Hellenistic statues relax throughout the show and permit us to see the apparatuses upon which they’re posed. At one point, Natalie unstraps herself and pops off to the loo and the façade cracks a little. These figures aloft on pedestals aren’t angels or Venuses de Milo. They are women turning their gaze on themselves and asking us to actually listen to their experience.
The details of the conversations might seem mundane but the accumulation of those experiences turns into something profound.
Ich Nibber Dibber, written, directed & performed by post (Zoë Coombs Marr, Natalie Rose & Mish Grigor. Set and costume design by Michael Hankin, light design by Fausto Brusamolino, sound design and composition by James Brown. At malthouse Theatre until September 26. Bookings
Access
Malthouse Theatre is wheelchair accessible. It is best that bookings are made as far in advance as possible.
Audio described performance: 8pm, Wednesday September 12. A tactile tour will take place following this performance. Audio Introduction here. Please note individuals accessing these services are eligible for concession-priced tickets. Please contact boxoffice@malthousetheatre.com.au for more information.
5 comments
Keith Got seem to have been impressed, but doesn’t really say whether he liked the show. It’s quite brilliant. Three intensely entertaining women riffle-shuffle through a playlist made up of a lifetime of conversations, chats, stories, arguments. Three characters, each utterly unlike the others, spinning a web of their commonplaces. It’s fiercely feminist, and frighteningly feminine. I’m a man, somewhat past middle age, and I really do try to shed the prejudices I was raised with, but I was startled to realise that, yes, women probably do talk like that when I’m not in the room.
I think it’s been a good night at the theatre when realise I can still be startled.
Apart from that, those three post women are very, very good at their schtick. The humour is as dry as dust – Natalie Rose’s deadpan delivery is like twigs cracking. Mish Grigor’s slightly zany ingenuousness follows a seamless progression from despising her mother to emulating her while Zoe Coombs-Marr projects the invulnerability of a woman dipped in the Styx of complete confidence in her sexuality. She also has the advantage of spending a great deal of time without a man in the room.
Then, after a thoughtful glass of red at the foyer bar and a reflective tram-ride, I realise that beneath the split-second timing, the dust-dry delivery and the comic irony are the shadows and echoes of sexual abuse, callous, neglectful and exploitative relationships, and the disappointment of aspirations unmet.
Hi Matthew, thanks for your feedback! Yes, I did like it. I liked it a lot. I got tied up thinking about how these women have taken such a simple premise and packed it with such meaning that I forgot to talk about how much I laughed. I laughed so much.
Sorry about the typo. Keith Goy seems, of course
GOW – it’s bloody auto-corrected me twice.
Thanks (typing very deliberately) Keith Gow. What I enjoyed most, after the laughter, was the feeling of fermentation going on in my brain afterwards. I really think a profound theatrical experience is not fully realised without a tram journey to finish it off. Trams may be one reason why Melbourne is Australia’s cultural capital. Tramsylvania.
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