CHOCOLATE MONKEY
 The Age
February 7, 2007
Cameron Woodhead, Reviewer
Chocolate Monkey is the opener in a trilogy of one-man shows from actor/director John-Paul Hussey. A contemporary of Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright, Hussey works in an inimitable avant-garde style that has proved popular enough for a return season.
The show is 1 1/4 hours of controlled lunacy - by turns bamboozling, compelling and hilarious - held together by the charisma and energy of its performer.
At base, Chocolate Monkey is meta-narrative. It's the tale of a one-man show called "Burnt Monkey", mounted by an alter ego, and plagued by manifold (and increasingly outlandish) setbacks that eventually scuttle the whole effort.
As with all good shaggy dog stories, the yarn frays into irrelevancies - a surreal break-up with an ex-girlfriend (with the couple depicted as Siamese primates), the horrors of dragging a trundle-wheel down the train tracks of suburban Melbourne, and the torment of finding a performance venue (ending in a warehouse above an Irish funeral parlour on Smith Street). It neatly skewers the pretentiousness of the local independent theatre scene while paying tribute to its resilience and commitment.
Hussey is a little bit Irish, and the Irish are great talkers. He's obviously been blessed by the Blarney Stone, remaining fluent and animated throughout. He's also a talented impersonator (his Sean Connery is a scream), and injects a full measure of physical performance, with effects ranging from agony to comedy.
While the script has in-joke elements (a working knowledge of Melbourne's fringe theatre will enhance your enjoyment) its ingenious one-liners and sly wit are broadly appealing. My favourite line: "It was so hot the Maori security guards raised their arms just a little bit". And Hussey's comic timing and delivery couldn't be better.
There are some less flattering aspects - mostly stumbling attempts to intellectualise what works best as a swift-tongued satire and cracking good yarn. The Jungian trappings and alchemical hoo-ha make about as much sense as Stephen Dedalus explaining, in Joyce's Ulysses, how Hamlet was really his own grandfather - and you want to stick a pin in those responsible.
But in the end, Hussey puts in such a dynamic and comically assured performance that Chocolate Monkey remains every bit as entertaining as it is strange.
February 10, 2007
Alison Croggon, Reviewer
It's been a dislocating week. Not for any traceable reason, but still, discombobulating enough to scatter my neurones over a wide field. In the midst of all this, I saw three pieces of theatre, all by men and all, in various ways, exploring the dilemmas of masculinity. Two of them were monologues - Chocolate Monkey and Detest.
In both of these shows, the audience is unable to be merely a spectator of an object called an actor, who plays for us roles hermetically sealed off from his or her life outside the theatre. Rather, we are drawn into direct relationship with a self that presents itself as autobiographical, with a performer who brazenly announces that he exists outside the four walls of the theatre, and who rudely intrudes his life on us, and himself, and art. This is dangerous territory but, using vastly differing strategies, both performers escape the trap of narcissism.
If Detest uses elements of a rock concert to make theatre, Chocolate Monkey employs the tropes of stand up comedy. John-Paul Hussey bills this show as "extreme storytelling", and its surreal verbal riffs remind me of nothing so much as Dylan Moran. (Perhaps it's the Irish accent, too, and the violent reaction against the easy kitsch of Oirishness).
It's easy to see why it was such a hit. Hussey is very funny indeed, with an ability to sketch vivid satirical portraits, at once mocking and fond, a raconteur's talent for accents and an appealing self-mockery; and under Lucien Savron's direction the show is slickly lit and designed. It's presented at the Arts Centre's Black Box under the aegis of the Store Room Theatre Workshop.
It's hard to say what Chocolate Monkey is about; its narratives splinter and dissolve, although in the mediaeval imagery projected on the stage and in the text itself there are many hints of a complex subtext. As Genet says of metaphor in the theatre, it ought to be like the rigging on a ship - visible from a distance. Here Hussey contents himself with subtleties that more properly belong to prose, and pushes the show through with the sheer vim of performance.
Among its several narratives, Chocolate Monkey traces the end of a relationship (described, in a striking image of mutual narcissism, as conjoined twins in a constrictingly narrow house) and Hussey's job as a auditor of the Melbourne rail system, which involved him trundling a measuring device over every inch of it, a physical purgatory that becomes a metaphor for redemption. But its central tale is of the disastrous production of an earlier show, Burnt Monkey, which through a series of comic misadventures never saw the light of day.
Hussey's fanatical eye for the eccentricities of inner thought and the extreme details of everyday experience - and his ability to communicate them - gives this piece its peculiar illumination. In a sense that is not dishonourable, it seems curiously pointless: he takes the risk of permitting the piece to be, like life itself, unclear, complex, full of loose ends and, in the end, resistant to interpretation. I am still unsure whether the risk is entirely successful, but I can say, unequivocally, that I enjoyed the ride. And I'm very curious to see what happens next.
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Melbourne Stage Online
February 12, 2007
Darryl Emmerson, Reviewer |
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Written and performed by John-Paul Hussey, and directed by Lucien Savron, Chocolate Monkey is currently enjoying its fifth season, and its popularity is not hard to understand. A skilled actor, mimic and story-teller, Hussey performs his own writing with energy and deft authority, if somewhat broadly, aided by well-planned changes of pace and mood, and ably assisted by an excellent sound and lighting design.
So far, so good. The subject, however, is something else. What is this show about? Something to do with coming to live in Melbourne, a relationship breaking down, losing weight, trying to stage a show, meeting all sorts of weird and wonderful characters, interspersed by good (but surprising, and hardly logical) imitations of Sean Connery and Kevin Costner… Serendipity, chance, eccentricity, the strangeness of life’s twistings and turnings… it’s all there. To call this rambling and often inconsequential entertainment a grab-bag is, therefore, probably to mistake its identity, those snakes are never going to be tied up. Of course, once you surrender to its skittering, scatter-gun, where’s it going-who cares? manner, there’s some real entertainment to be had, most notably a hilarious sequence about a job on the Metropolitan Train Network, and the need for its workers to have ballast, an excuse for Hussey to engage in a wild, irritable, amazed stream-of-consciousness rave worthy of Beckett or Perelman. It is refreshing to see a show so casually contemporary in its references, and not trying too hard or obviously in the process. Emotionally, like many shows which highlight versatility, imitation, the constant use of voice, along with abrupt and often unnecessary changes of mood or pace, Chocolate Monkey is pretty much horizontal, the breadth it seeks - and achieves - is certainly at the expense of depth. All that said, you could do much worse than catch this original and skilled, if somewhat baffling, piece in its last week.
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