The Yellow Wave

The Yellow Wave is a bombastic deconstruction, accomplishing for Kenneth Mackay's eponymous exemplar of invasion literature what Charlie Chaplin did for Adolph Hitler's career (not to compare Kenneth Mackay's literary fantasy with Nazi ideology).

Keith Brockett and John Marc Desengano shine as they vividly portray a cavalcade (sometimes literally) of characters straight out of your worst pulp nightmares. Their performances deserve a great degree of accolade, not only for their incredible energy and hilarious characterisation, but their ability as two individuals to handle portraying a main cast of many, and hordes of tens of thousands of background characters, as pretty damn near perfectly as you might hope for. Andrea McCannon's narration of the nearly incoherent plot of the original book grounds the action on stage. Her presence as narrator shows a penchant for restrained humour, punctuated by staccato bursts of high energy comedy.

The simple intimacy of the staging complements the performance very well, with costumes and dressing of the venue evocative of the context of the text. Beng Oh's direction stands out in The Yellow Wave, balancing the franticness of the action with the precision in the language of Jane Miller's performance text, as it deconstructs both The Yellow Wave (the book) and the context of its genesis.

The net effect is an almost vaudevillian celebration of the absurd and grotesque, leaving the question of what still lingers in the contemporary Australian mindset.