“Federation Squad”

So Friday night I got to play ticket collector at the indie piece of satirical theatre, “Federation Squad”. (Or as one friend put it to me, “You were a door bitch?”)

The show picks up the controversy surrounding Melbourne’s new arts precinct and tells a (fictitious, scurrilous) story of the crack team of self-obsessed artistic egotists commissioned to design it and stage an opening event. There’s a right-wing arts bureaucrat, an androgynous alcoholic architect, a congenitally cheerful journalist, a German video artist (who also plays leaf-blower in kraut-pop band), a dancer – sorry, “interpretative movement artist” – who can only respond creatively to the early works of Madison Avenue, and a costume designer straight from Sylvania Waters.

Though I missed the first 15 minutes, and it took me a little while to warm to it, I really had fun. The humour is unapologetically leftie, sick and delightfully tasteless. (I had, in fact, expected the September 11 material to come across as much more questionable than it did. In fact, it was pretty funny and managed to acknowledge it’s own lack of taste. It was more the “genital abnormality” riff towards the end I had trouble –um – responding to?) I suppose poking fun at arts bureaucracy, the occasional tokenism of Australia’s multicultural society and deliberately obscure performance and new-media artists is not that hard. There were some uneven moments to the production, but I certainly left the performance feeling I’d had a good time.

The show had two principal problems. The first was a lack of audience. Friday was apparently the worst night of the show’s first week – a terribly, terribly small crowd, and part of the fun of live comedy is joining in that sort of audience pack-mentality that emerges where laughter sets off laughter. The laughs are a little more timid when you have a sprinkling of people through a number of empty seats. I think that the limited audience probably didn’t help the cast either – the rhythm of comedy doesn’t work so well if there isn’t a certain amount of energy coming from the audience, which is hard to draw from a small house.

The second is that Horti Hall is not a great venue for this kind of show. It’s a large, echoing space which isn’t easy for spoken word stuff: anyone delivering their own lines too fast tends to come across as a little muddy, competing with their own faint echoes.

(Also, while “Federation Squad” has a (light, comic) storyline it feels a lot more like a review, and I wasn’t entirely convinced the final sequence of revelations and reflections really came off – though rounding off a script this off-the-wall was clearly going to be a challenge.)

These are all minor reservations. As I said, I had a fun night.

My favourite moment was the interpretative movement artist’s (re)presentation of a death by animal mauling. I laughed myself silly. The video presentations, including the media-artists “recreation” of the Federation Square opening event were also really rather funny.

This is a good indie comedy and well worth supporting. With a good-sized audience the show could go off. When attending, though, be prepared to be very silly and get tasteless.

Tickets are available at the door, and some are available through half-tix.


“Federation Squad: the shady cultural operatives brought together to subtly mould your ideas about Twin Shards, Fallen Arches and the National Interest.”

Featuring: Robin Garden, Michael Parry, Monique Schaffer, Emma Richards, Jane Thomson, Elise Hearst and Anita Dow.

Material Contributed by: Richard Higgins and Hilary Harper Produced by: Nichole Weinrich

Season Wed-Sat, 13-28 March , 8pm.
Horti Hall, Victoria Parade, Melbourne
(across from Trades Hall, Carlton).
Parking Available in Mackenzie Street. Latecomers welcome.

Tickets: $18/$14.
Bookings on 9387 2690.