Photo: Marc MarnieIt’s the end of the world as we know it- so why not spend your final hours with Gdjet and Lulu as they crawl up from the gutters and swamps of society to provide an evening of apocalyptic-ally good entertainment. Read more …
Armed with only stools, microphones, a red curtain and a spotlight, they expose the hypocrisy and reveal the truth behind the bedtime stories we are told by the powers-that-be who wish us to continue our 21st century sleep...
Set during the last night on Earth, Apocalypse criss-crosses from the recent Past to the relentless Present, as our two hosts bravely face down an unimaginable and unavoidable Future. Are they fallen angels sent here to warn us or desperate charlatans playing one last con?
Apocalypse is a self-consciously kooky experience.
Gillard and Walsh look frightened by the audience, and their performances, although good-natured, lack the slickness of the seasoned burlesque star.
The idea is so vivid, though – so timely, so disturbing, and so well worked out in the best of Clancy’s writing – that the show is impossible to resist.
As satire, it raises questions rather than giving answers (I don’t imagine [writer] Clancy has renounced his own decadent western ways) and it runs the risk of making the audience feel powerless. At its best, though it is both blackly funny and polemical.
For a performance which is welcoming the end of the world, it either needs to be more reflective of society’s ills, or what we perceive them to be, or a true ironic celebration of those inadequacies (balloons and all). So it’s an intriguing, rough and ready performance, which when tweaked and trimmed, will fall so slickly into the black comedy genre.
Director Peter Clerke keeps it tight, on the whole, although it lacks a true cabaret’s finesse and fizz, particularly with Clancy’s more obvious points as he nears his climax.
Even in our seemingly bleak world of overpopulation, famine, floods, hurricanes and terrorist attacks, one leaves...feeling hopeful, even excited, and very glad that it wasn't the end of the world.
While Clancy’s broadly satirical script is keenly observed, and at times discomfiting, the atmosphere created by our barstool artistes remains stubbornly flat.
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On Tour, from Wednesday October 5, 2011, until Saturday October 29, 2011.
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