A RUMBUSTIOUS TALE THAT CRASHES THROUGH
Date: 24/11/1991
Publication: The Sun Herald

LET'S hear two loyal cheers for The Headbutt | For form and for energy the
showearns our applause. The third cheer, which ought to be for content,
must remain as silent as the sound of one hand clapping.
Stephen Abbott, who wrote and co-directed the show, is one of Newcastle's
finest. No, not one of the Knights rugby league players, though that has a
lot to do with the play's story.

Steve's a founder of The Castanet Club, the comedy group that bade fair to
be Novocastrian of the Decade for the '80s.

Stage manager/performer Peter Mahony and co-director/featured performer
Glenn Butcher are also Castanets. They've clicked resoundingly into the
rhythms of this rumbustious, boys-own tale of the chunderful 21st birthday
of a lad who's come down from Taree to try out as a hooker for the
Knights.

Two men and two women share a house in Newcastle, presumably in amity
until they are joined by Chris, the Taree hooker. He chaotically enlivens
their routine and becomes the central focus of the night.

The first and louder cheer that the show deserves is for simply crashing
through the so-called fourth-wall convention of stage naturalism.

We, the audience, are occasionally acknowledged by the cast, and Stephen
Curtis's design invites us to sit on three sides of the playing area. In
this case the fourth wall is the back wall of the set and the theatre.

Perhaps I am being grateful for small mercies. After all, abolishing
thepretence that the audience isn't there is no more than club and cabaret
performers do all the time.

Still, it enables the production to use some disarming conventions, for
example, when the cast create a car or a rowing boat, or vacuum the floor.

Having established a critic-friendly environment, the cast then proceed to
act with verve and honesty in the way that allows performers to keep a lot
of their own characteristics.

David Hoey as Chris is longer and leaner than any hooker I've ever seen
pack into a scrum, but his regular, buck-toothed smile is engaging.

David Wenham enhances his growing reputation as a lively lad in ocker
roles, while Glenn Butcher gives an object lesson in medium-high camp to
more self-indulgent actors in that genre.

In the story's ineradicable naturalism neither of the women is much
challenged. Melanie Salomon, playing the prettier one, is let down by a
speaking voice that lacks projection and tonal depth. She sings as well as
the others in a series of songs that vary from good to distinctly
unmemorable.

Celia Ireland, who looks rather like a younger Kerry Walker, shows a very
well developed comic sense and steals the show as Chris's dad, down from
Taree for the match.

That scene, easily the best of the night, points to the problems elsewhere
in the script. As a narrative it can't support more than a half-hour
sketch or playlet. The form is often jocosely stylised, but the content is
the unthinking fodder of naturalism.

I doubt that even a thoroughly surreal account of these few days in the
life of Chris and his housemates would make their story worth telling at
Belvoir St.

Chris is a feeble offspring of David Williamson's more shocking Stork of
20 years ago. There was reason to meet Stork and his mates then. Belvoir
St seeks a new development in a tradition that started two decades ago by
celebrating boisterous, boozing louts who could not relate to women.

Are we being told that nothing has changed? In an historical context the
headbutters are a rancid spread on a very stale loaf.