Jez Watts, As Seen Nowhere made the most of a small audience at the basement of the Athenaeum Theatre, on opening night of the Dunedin Fringe Festival, by adapting to a conversational style.
The venue has a wonderful gothic aura which starts at the top of the faded elegant stair well descending into a high-ceilinged curtained space replete with the Melbourne vibe of broken plaster. There is a small but precise drawing of a sail ship on the plaster behind the stage.
Jez’s material relies on personal experiences. It marauds around his partner’s dysfunctional behaviour, her love of knives, killing, animals and her sexual proclivities. His dysfunctions are added to the mix highlighting his autism and comparative lack of income, sexual adventures and families’ criminality. It focuses on his own adventures with ingesting and smuggling drugs and meeting the numerous parents-in-law. All familiar stuff and in itself more sad than amazingly funny. However Jez’s laugh is infectious and the audience is generous in its response. His stories range from a geriatric personal masseur, being high going through American customs, his military discharge from the Australian forces, living with 50 rabbits, a snail and a spear gun in the confines of a Melbourne apartment, to such modern day problems as stealing from supermarkets and surviving testicular tattoos to being a white man raised to exploit Chinese labour.
In a day and age in which world affairs are driven by the orange egghead elephant in the room, it is intriguing and disappointing that that material was left to an unexplored nervous throw away at the end of the breath. Jez’s claustrophobic world becomes a statement on its own of current avoidance of our larger pressing issues. Instead it becomes an escape hatch for those experiencing Jez’s mid-life existential crises.
Review by Marian Poole
