Work In Progress: Mad

Based on the poetry of author and schizophrenic Sandy Jeffs, Brisbane Festival production Work in Progress: MAD felt like a great show that is still very much in its infancy. Told primarily through music, movement, and film, the piece is at its most transcendent when the confusion of all these elements happen at once, reaching a fever pitch. Echoing some of the anxiety and unease constant at the dark heart of the schizophrenic condition.

The songs, compositionally, are terrific, even if I disagree that writer Sandy Jeffs' verbose poetry doesn't quite lend itself to the rhythm and reliability required of a song. At its best, you understand the sentiment that's being sung because of natural indications of the music, and at its worst, it sounds like that Spicks & Specks game where someone has to sing the lines of a textbook to a musical refrain. This isn't to say Jeffs' poetry isn't affecting, or indeed great poetry – it's just that it hasn't here been worked in a way that best serves its complicated cadence. All in all, MAD is a show with terrific promise, and three truly faultless  lead performances.

Post-script:

The audience Q&A that closed the show was truly insufferable, however. Somehow, our crowd was filled with rabid over-appreciators; a riddle of idiots who asked dawdling, posey questions that were as toothless as they were tedious. It was the King Lear scene from Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret writ painfully real, and a markedly irritating finish to the evening.