Review by Alison Stoddart
Furious Mattress is lifted from a true story that occurred in the mid 90’s in rural Victoria. A tale of an exorcism gone wrong, it centres on human weaknesses and where religious belief is an excuse for control, oppression, cruelty and abuse.
The play begins ominously with the still form of a woman (Else) lying in a bed. We hear the buzzing of flies, a display of foreshadowing, but is only attributed to the hot weather heating up the country house where the drama unfolds. Else’s husband Pearce and sister-in-law Anna, a pious and misguided woman, together are determined to release Else from her demonic possession.
Pearce and Anna are played by Julian Garner and Alex Malone competently, but it is Matilda Ridgway as Else who commands the stage with her presence. Else is impish and mischievous but also erratic and her bi-polar outbursts scare her increasingly confused but God-fearing husband Pearce. Her openness about sex and her need for physical touch repulses him. Rather than focusing inward on why this is so, he is convinced Else is not her ‘old self’, whatever indoctrinated and repressed form that may have been, and the reason he brings an exorcist to the home.
Reducing a person’s personality to the binary of normal/abnormal is still all too common and hopefully it will be the persevering of neural diverse young people who refuse to hide their differences but rather educate and promote acceptance.
The play comes alive when analepsis is used and we witness what happened to put Else in that bed. Enter Max, a sly and misogynistic ex-plumber engaged to perform the exorcism on poor Else. A man so hapless that he sees nothing wrong in proudly announcing he learnt everything from watching the movie The Exorcist! Shan-Ree Tan bring sufficient malevolence to the role of Max to have me surreptitiously booing and hissing him.
Lies, deceit and fanaticism abound and the seeds of doubt about the integrity of Anna are sown when her lying about playing netball is quite easily seen. She likes to sugar coat things and her view of what is happening to Else helps to confuse Pearce even more. “Exorcism is a very old-fashioned word, I prefer to say deliverance” Anna can be heard saying.
Under Margaret Thanos’ direction the play moves fast. The action is very physical and the violence just fake enough to make it both shocking but amusing. The central premise of Else being possessed is wholeheartedly picked up and ran with, resulting in a bizarre scene of gothic demonic birth, moving it into black comedy territory.
It is not often that an inanimate object steals the show in a play but the mattress produces an energetic and engaging performance, employing the Meisner technique to great aplomb.
The set is a steel framed design of a house, but the metal bars sometimes get in the way and being an audience on three sides, line of sight of the action is often impeded by a cast member’s back.
The show is part of 25A, a Belvoir initiative to support the artists of the future and is based on a novel by Melissa Reeves. The downstairs theatre is an intimate space which makes the outrageous performance of the demon a confronting spectacle.
A young audience was in attendance, no doubt to support the 25A initiative of independent and emerging artists who have produced and marketed Furious Mattress themselves. The play is a wild ride which ultimately invites the question of who is the possessed and who is the possessor.
