[2015064] The Bureau of Complaints
AJZ Productions @ Channel 9 Kevin Crease Studios
4:00pm, Sun 22 Feb 2015
So – 4pm had come and gone, and the large audience that had gathered for this premiere of Alirio Zavarce’s latest work were sweltering under the water misters that were providing little relief, but plenty of additional humidity. I hear through the grapevine that entry to the venue was being held back to allow reviewers from The Advertiser to arrive… and I start fretting about how I’m going to get to my next show.
Once we were shunted inside (oh blessed air conditioning!), Alirio Zavarce and Matt Crook appear to much fanfare and introduce the premise of the show: to take the public’s complaints onboard. To that end, there’s a lot of vox pop videos where people air their grievances, as well as (disappointingly few) comments from their specially-commissioned “Confession Booth”, which clearly hadn’t seen too much use from the public. And that’s a shame, since I got the feeling that the Confession Booth was supposed to be the core of the show, with the Bureau responding to the Booth’s complainants.
But, in the absence of more material from the public, there’s a few asides about the need to facilitate the venting of complaint in society, as well as tips on how to be successful with complaints: Chris Crocker’s Leave Brittany Alone meme-trigger was used as a counter-example. And what arts performance about public dissatisfaction would be complete without some soft jabs at political complaints? (Tony Abbott is such a soft – but deserving – target!)
In their trench-coats and trilbies, Zavarce and Crook look the part as agents of The Bureau of Complaints, but when the biggest public complaint (lodged thus far) is about those little stickers on apples, then you have to question the Bureau’s usefulness.
In short: this was a fun idea, but – rather than seeing the premiere of this production – I wish I’d seen it at the end of its season (by which time, one would hope, there would be meatier material to work with).
(64) The Bureau of Complaints: Earnest show with hi production values that will benefit from more complaints. #ff2015 #ADLfringe
— Pete Muller (@festivalfreakAU) February 22, 2015