Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall, Who's The Sickest Fan Of All?
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday November 13, 2001
ONE SHOT, Cat + Fiddle, November 7, MUD IN YOUR EYE, The Hughenden, November 8.
``Are you talking to me?" asks Charlie, wearing black pants, glasses and an undone shirt. He's holding his own gaze in an imaginary mirror, doing flexes and shooter moves, enacting the famous sequence from Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver.
Charlie is talking to Robert de Niro, via a letter he's dictating. Charlie is an obsessive fan of the famous American actor, and it's the sad locus of fandom that is the subject of Mark Kilmurry's monologue, performed here by John Trutwin.
Being a fan at the level of ``I like band X, director Y and/or star Z" or obsessively collecting movie figurines is mostly unremarkable. Charlie has gone far further, reaching the point of fandom where he is living his life through his idea of de Niro.
The desperately one-sided relationship is built upon imagined intimacy the idea that he and de Niro are alike, and the fantasy that the object of fandom is aware of the adoring subject: ``Maybe you feel the same way I do, because we understand each other, don't we, Bobby?" Charlie has little sense of his own person detached from de Niro, at one point opining that there's ``something creepy" about obsessive film fans.
Those people are losers unlike Charlie, whose projected special relationship with the distant uncaring de Niro rescues him from such tragedy in his own mind.
There's a girl he meets, loves and loses. There's much aggro, and a lot of pleasingly dark comedy.
Fittingly, there are also numerous guns (armed with multiple caps which are rather loud in the tiny Cat + Fiddle space).
It's a muscular, dark and subtly threatening piece, oddly reminiscent of Eminem's Stan (though written years before and without that piece's trowlled-on pathos and forced construction de Niro never replies to Charlie here, which is the way star/fan dichotomies usually work).
Trutwin gives a very restrained and controlled performance, saving his energy for the monologue's big moments. He does a good de Niro, but mostly Charlie speaks in his own, sadly Australian voice.
Dorothy Parker was definitely not a loser despite the failed marriages, the depression, the suicide attempts and the heroic drinking. In Mud In Your Eye, Emma Cordero and Lisbeth Kennelly perform pieces by the famed US short-story writer, versifier and acid-tongued critic.
Despite some biographical moments (chiefly sharp retorts in various bars), this piece presents the work rather than the life.
Several of Parker's stories are performed to good effect the comic The Waltz, the drunk-regrets dialogue You Were Perfectly Fine and the remarkably modern critique of middle-class racial patronising Arrangement In Black and White being my favourites. Her most famous poem Resume (``You might as well live") also gets an outing.
Both performers are good, and it's an entertaining enough show that will probably most appeal to fans of Parker's small though brilliant oeuvre. It could be more satisfying if further developed with biographical elements to place these entertaining textual fragments in a wider context.
© 2001 Sydney Morning Herald
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