A ONE MAN SHOWPIECE
Author: Ken Healey
Date: 16/02/1992
Publication: The Sun Herald

IT has been a week notable for young performers creating their own work:
Lounge Acts at the Harold Park hotel, and David Wenham Downstairs at the
SeymourCentre.

He has chosen a contemporary writer, Dario Fo, who was expelled from the
Italian communist party for being too far to the left.

Wenham is performing a one-man show that Fo developed from a street
performance he saw in Shanghai. Its overt political content comes toward
the end of its 70-odd minutes, when Party mandarins try to dictate a
village's relationship with its tigers. Before that, the story is simple
in the extreme, and works on a personal level.

In China the tiger is a symbol of courage. One of Mao's troops, fighting
the armies of Chiang Kai Chek, is wounded and, at his own request, left by
his comrades. He enters a cave which turns out to be a tiger's den. His
relationship with her and her cub is as uplifting as it is literally
incredible.

Fo gradually worked up a quarter of an hour's material into a performance
piece for himself. Those who have seen him do his Mistero Buffo on video
will know what an extraordinary performing focus and energy he brings to
the service of his writing.

He tends to perform in factories and other non-theatre spaces, relying, as
a busker does, on his magnetic persona and his politically and socially
sharp material.

David Wenham has chosen to disarm the theatrical conventions by talking to
his audience as it settles, and only gradually moving into the telling of
his tale.

He quite frequently involves members of the audience in his story, and
even gets the whole house roaring on cue like tigers. Yet he does not
overdo the skills of the panto dame.

He has a credit in the program for having co-directed this piece, and it
is clear that there has been a primary input, simply from his persona. I
use that word advisedly.

It is a performer's public personality which is closer to himself than any
character he may assume. But it is never quite the performer's offstage
self. Television personalities work off their personas constantly.

In that regard David Wenham is an angular-featured young man with a lithe
body and expressive arms and hands. Some of his most impressive moments
theatrically were his unselfconscious gestures as he chatted to us about
the show.

He displays a wide range of voices and postures during the tale itself,
but properly hangs the telling on the thread of his own public self. For
instance, there is no hint of realism in the descriptions of pain or fear.
The mode is folk-epic narrative, and Wenham has a natural flair for it.

To say that he does not sound the resonances of the piece the way Fo would
do, or even as he will do himself in 10 or 15 years is not to belittle
Wenham's achievement in any way. Fo wrote for himself, a mature man. The
way a youngerman understands and presents it will be different.

I should have liked a little more darkness, but I'll settle for a
stimulating, thought-provoking, and mercifully short night in the theatre.