Avast & Avast II - The Welshman Cometh, by Black Lung Theatre Company, presented by the Malthouse. With Sacha Bryning, Gareth Davies, Thomas Henning, Mark Winter, Thomas Wright and Dylan Young. Sound design and music by Liam Barton, lighting design by Govin Ruben. Tower Theatre, CUB Malthouse, until December 6.

In a model of enlightened patronage, the Malthouse Theatre this year offered the Black Lung Theatre Company and Whaling Firm (to give it its full moniker) a three month residency in the Tower. And, it seems, basically left them alone to see what would happen, in the spirit of a scientist leaving a petri dish at the back of a laboratory. The result is Avast - a reprise of this company's first show - and Avast II - The Welshman Cometh, a new work which is (apparently) a prequel to Avast.


The Black Lung is a collective of seven startlingly fearless performers, who devise a particular kind of anti-theatre that at once brilliantly exploits and destroys theatrical artifice. They attracted particular notice with their Fringe hit Rubeville, which deservedly carried off the gongs in the Melbourne and Adelaide Fringe Festivals with its blackly hilarious assault on the delusions of celebrity culture.

A crucial element of their previous work has been the sense that the audience enters a self-contained environment, in which the events they perform (it’s hard to call them “plays”) follow their own inscrutable laws. This environmental element could easily have been compromised by their move to a main stage, but the three month residency seems to have been spent on extensive renovations. The Tower is almost unrecognisable; it has the air of a bizarre, ramshackle domicile rather than a conventional theatre, a place that is lived in rather than a mere stage.

It's fascinating to see what is, in effect, a mini-retrospective, jamming together their first and most recent works. The two shows, for all their common provenance, are actually quite distinct from each other. Both exploit clichés from mass culture – The Lord of the Rings, samurai movies, westerns, role playing games, apocalypse fiction – and, like all parodies, also pay them fond homage. And each has a narrative of sorts. Avast concerns two brothers meeting again after long estrangement, while Avast II is a post-apocalyptic western in which a stranger arrives at an isolated settlement to rescue the doomed inhabitants.

However you look at it, there's no escaping that the Black Lung is men's business. The company is all male, and squinting through the shambolic disorder of Avast and Avast II reveals a deep preoccupation with contemporary male anxiety.

In both these shows, the contradictory construction of masculinity - the delusions and mythlogies that sustain it - is put under extreme pressure. Like the theatrical conventions that are invoked only to be exploded, these delusions collapse, leaving in their place the raw and absurd presence of the (often) naked and (always) sexually ambiguous body. The abject incontinence of the feminine body - its uncontrollable leakages of blood, sexual fluids, tears, saliva - is, in traditional ideas of masculinity, contrasted with self-sufficient, impermeable manliness. But here the naked male body leaks various fluids with as much promiscuous abandon as Woman.

Avast II (the prequel, remember) opens with a tour de force: the baptism of a baby that, with a touch of gothic horror, lots of smoke and moody lighting and a brooding Nick Cavean guitar accompaniment, invokes the ritualistic nature of theatre. (Ritual is, in fact, not at all inappropriate as a way of understanding these shows: they are, among other things, enactments of psychic expiation.) Here a wild-eyed priest figure (Mark Winter) shouts incantations into a microphone before raising a cleaver and cutting off the baby's hand in a sacrifice that is intended to protect his frontier community from some dreadful evil that assails it.

We then strike the Gunslinger figure (Gareth Davies), the lone hero who encounters the handless baby (Dylan Young), now grown up. Gareth is The Welshman, and he lassoos young Dylan and drags him around in a way that rather irresistibly recalls Lucky and Pozzo in Beckett's Waiting for Godot. They make their way to the frontier town, where the luckless inhabitants, led by the Mayor (Thomas Henning in top hat, pyjamas and wheelchair) are assailed by some supernatural beast at nightfall and lock their doors in terror. The strangers are left outside to die.

The Hero and his sidekick are attacked, saved by God (a deux ex machina puppet lowering from the flies), shoot Him dead, and enter the amazed township. Then they do the Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven thing, rousing the inhabitants with an exhilarating spoof of sumarai fight sequences and boldly striding off to do battle. The hero gets the Girl (Thomas Wright in an appalling black wig and nightie), stealing him/her from the town's blacksmith (Sacha Bryning). They fight the monster, the Girl dies, and then...

Well, then the story gets kind of forgotten. One of the intriguing aspects of Black Lung's practice is how the company quite genuinely channels the power of gothic melodrama and epic grandeur, while at the same time mercilessly taking the piss. This is not suspension of disbelief so much as its constant levitation, before the tightrope snaps with loud twang. And maybe what happens after that twang gets terminal is most interesting, as the theatre cuts closer and closer to literal reality: a recitation, for example, of the various ways the cast will die in the future, which generates a superstitious creepiness, as if it's a curse; or an extraordinary monologue which is a gem in itself and which takes the show into entirely different emotional territory.

And then it kind of finishes with a song, with no clear signal to indicate it's over. Certainly no bows. Like other Black Lung shows, it just stops, and leaves you to wonder what just happened.

Avast (their earliest show, which supposedly follows their latest - are you with me?) is similar in how it constructs and brutally destroys staged realities. The narrative here is simpler - a long estranged brother (Gareth Davies) returns home, and confronts his brother (Thomas Wright). Davies, who most of the time stands in a washing machine, is covered in blood, and Wright is wearing black speedos and appears to be covered in semen.

The dialogues continue through all the necessary clichés (the dead mother, the revelations, the recriminations - "you were never there!"), interrupted by various strange visitations - a man in a ten-gallon hat and outrageous moustache, a polar bear. And then the whole thing explodes. I'm reluctant to describe how, but suffice to say that I've seldom seen meta-theatre done so effectively. It left my theatre partner, young Ben, sleepless with outrage, distress and dilemma.

These brutal interventions of literal reality go way past parody, generating a sense of genuine abjection and discomfort. There really is no way of predicting what will happen in the next moment and, with the help of some remarkable performances, it makes for riveting theatre. It's risky stuff that could easily slump into boring mayhem or mere embarrassment, and The Black Lung only gets away with it because their apparent anarchy is underlaid by some steely discipline and accuracy. And sheer front, of course.

Another version of this review is in today's Australian.

Picture: The Black Lung Theatre Company and Whaling Firm