Wild Cabbage at the SiLo Theatre

By FRANCIS TILL

A spectacularly silly bit of psychedelic-era fluff, Wild Cabbage deserves to be reprised as a slapstick cartoon in the Manga style. As theatre, however, it overwhelms itself with overlong scenes and studied ambiguities.

Originally produced in the 1980s (it won an award as best New Zealand play in 1985) and shocking audiences in its time, James Beaumont's text suffers from the fact that popular culture has absorbed and digested all that was radical in it, leaving us with a tepid tea brewed of flower-child sensibilities and retro-garde insights about the Kiwi family and God's disposition.

Happily, Ben Crowder directs the eight-actor cast to play most of what's on offer for laughs, using makeup and exaggerated costuming to emphasise the clownishness of the undertaking.

Of particular note is the campy performance of Warwick Broadhead as "Mr G" (presumably, God), the boss at The Agency, who, having created all things, is now a wandering, senile ruminant among them. Mr G has many of the best lines in the play and pushes the envelope, as it were, with a skit in which he has trouble keeping track of his catheter bag.

At the other end of the spectrum is a standout performance by Yuri Kunigawa as Freak. Kunigawa, known to audiences from her extraordinary performance in Niki Caro's film Memory and Desire, has no spoken lines but puts out a transfixing physical performance marked by almost serpentine grace.

However, in this full-length production (two hours plus intermission) far too much is milked for far too long and little lives up to the dumbfounding birth scene that opens the work.

The play's novel seating requirements (putting the audience in two very long banks that face one another across the core performance area) continues to work and does put some spice in the broth.

If one happens to be in a front-row seat, as half the audience is, considerable amounts of the action take place within the personal space boundary and some audience members can count on getting up close and personal with cast and props, as well as tossed (non-toxic, non-staining, non-threatening) effluvia.