Lady Eats Apple (Back To Back Theatre)

In the beginning, the stage was without form and void. Taking on the metaphysical mythology of creation, this isn't a bad place for Back to Back Theatre's latest production, Lady Eats Apple, to start. The cavernous space that stretches out before the audience, making Melbourne's Hamer Hall unrecognisable, may be empty, but it is also full of possibilities: when your subject matter is the genesis of everything, the narrative opportunities are all but inexhaustible.

Back To Back's ensemble of actors with perceived intellectual disabilities has excellent form going toe to toe with profound existential conundrums, using a playful yet powerful mode of storytelling to bust these towering topics down to size. Tackling religious perspectives on disability is also familiar territory, explored in the company's confronting yet whimsical meditation on Nazis and eugenics, Ganesh Versus The Third Reich. However, despite the narrative possibilities, the provocative subject matter and the calibre of Back to Backs' previous triumphs, Lady Eats Apple promises much but under delivers.

The first part imagines God, played with confidence by Scott Price, as a frustrated and insecure stagehand. The act of creation is something to alleviate boredom, with the quaking doom of God's wrath merely a sound effect thrown in for shits and giggles. A reassuring mentor (Australian theatre stalwart Brian Lipson) tries to steady the anxious young deity, perhaps suggesting that our wondrous world is in fact just a first go by an apprentice God-in-training. The moral absurdity of the tree of knowledge is wittily unriddled when framed as the result of a juvenile strop, and this neatly sets up an interesting observation about the arbitrary and unfair condescension that people living with perceived disabilities experience every day.

From here, however, things become less easily to absorb. A suddenly suicidal turn from God's kindly mentor sees him begging to be euthanised, although the reasons for this seem somewhat facile. The confusion deepens when the show's astonishing coup de theatre dazzles the audience for the briefest of moments only to be squandered by plunging the audience into darkness. In the gloaming, barely visible forms move about the space as soothing electro chill out lulls us into a trance. The effect is akin to being in a floatation tank and there is something beguiling about this meditative lull, but what exactly is to be gleaned narratively from this 20-minute sedate hiatus is far from obvious.

Fortunately, Mark Cuthbertson's audacious set has one more breathtaking trick up its sleeve and this final reveal is a genuinely jaw-dropping experience. Suddenly, we are returned to the real world from this abstract abyss and once again we are offered a study of how the desires and ambitions of the disabled are all too often dismissed. This final act offers some much needed emotional gravity to pull the vagaries of this production towards a clearer message, but despite some touching moments, there's simply not enough material developed to make for a satisfying conclusion.

Back To Back Theatre presents Lady Eats Apple, at the Hamer Hall until 12 Oct. Part of the Melbourne Festival