‘Robots vs Art’ – Tamarama Rock Surfers

ROBOTS VS ART – BY TRAVIS COTTON
DIRECTED BY TRAVIS COTTON
TAMARAMA ROCK SURFERS – BONDI PAVILION
18 JUNE – 7 JULY 2013

Sybil: So, Robots vs Art is billed as the ‘Smash hit of the Melbourne Comedy Festival’.
Lea: Is it really?
Sybil: It really is. It also says that it’s virtually flawless and that it was side splittingly funny.
Lea: There was one scene that was very funny? Not side splitting…
Sybil: I think I might have laughed once or twice… but you know what I was wondering? If it was just the audience tonight? ‘Cos you know how sometimes, in a comedy, if the audience don’t get on board with it right away, it’s really hard to turn them around?
Lea: But it didn’t come across as a comedy… to me at all. Unfortunately it came across as… a first showing… of a first draft…
Sybil: Of a play that was really, genuinely, ONE idea.
Lea: Yeah. If they’d riffed further on the rehearsal scene with the robots, then that would have been a fantastic play. That scene was the highlight for me, as you heard.
Sybil: Yes!
Lea: And Claw Bot (Paul Goddard) was the standout for me. The delivery of his lines. He had the best lines.
Sybil: But again,  they were trying to create this world where they had robots that couldn’t feel – and therefore you’d assume wouldn’t understand humour – and yet, for all that, they were all coming out with…
Lea: Humorous lines.
Sybil: Patently funny lines, which was great! But didn’t fit the premise of the show
Lea: That would have fit if Claw Bot had something in his program that made him different. That could have been explored as an idea – that the lesser functioning robots actually had a superior ability to feel. But I fundamentally have a problem with the character of Giles (Daniel Fredriksen), being the only human left. As he talks about his wife being killed when the robots took over, he doesn’t actually show a lot of emotion linked to that event. Besides the fact that I really had a problem believing that he was a playwright at all. There was no way I thought he was involved in the Arts, and that made it really difficult to believe that he had been singled out as somebody who could help the robots develop art.
Sybil: Yes, exactly. And I agree. *sigh* Yeah.
Lea: And the pace… wasn’t working.
Sybil: Really, really not.
Lea: And the direction wasn’t working.
Sybil: No, I agree.
Both: *nervous laughter*
Lea: And I really struggle with this, because I’ve seen this playwright (Travis Cotton) and his work before and it was witty and clever, and pacey, and smart.
Sybil: This wasn’t.
Lea: It…
Sybil: …wasn’t!
Lea: No! And it never elevated itself. It might be a slow set up to start with, but all of a sudden it’s going to slip into gear, into this fantastic gear…
Sybil: And we’re going to understand why there was all that set up! But I was noticing people around me fidgeting and yawning and sniffing and shifting in their seats, and you know, that’s never a good sign.
Lea: No.
Sybil: But again, we’ve both been in shows where you have an off-night, where the audience just don’t seem to get on board, and it’s just really, really hard to get it back.
Lea: That’s true, and it felt like it was a small audience tonight.
Sybil: Yes.
Lea: ‘Cos apparently last night sold out and someone I know saw the show and really liked it. So maybe it’s just one of those cold nights in Bondi. And maybe last night was a high and… yeah. It’s really hard to see, with what was in front of us tonight, how it could have been…
Sybil: ‘Side splitting’. ‘Virtually flawless’…
Lea: Yeah. But that scene was trying…
Sybil: The rehearsal scene was funny.
Lea: The rehearsal scene was really good and the whole idea of directing robots via percentages… (quoting the play) “Make that emotion… y’know… 2,000,000% more intense”.
Sybil: Yeah. That was really amusing.
Lea: That kind of nuancing was fun and – oh goodness, the parallels to actually directing were quite funny, and the in-jokes they were using we can certainly appreciate. But you can’t stand a play on one successful scene.
Sybil: That was the best scene. But, he’s been down in a mine, in the dark, sleeping in a tiny little space and hardly ever sleeping, and working a 14 hour day and he didn’t seem at all emotionally scarred by that.
Lea: Yeah…
Sybil: And, by the way, minor issue, but if you’re down in the mines – I’m guessing you’re quite a way down because he says he hasn’t seen the sunlight for years – and a weed starts pushing its way through… it ain’t gonna be green! ‘Cos there’s no light there for it to photosynthesize!
Lea: *laughs* Ok fair enough! You know, if you think about how the play talked about how to construct a play… the obstacle in the end actually wasn’t that great to overcome, and the protagonist didn’t really try that hard to be honest. Like, at the end when he was basically given the chance to live or die, depending on the outcome of the play, he decided to take that chance just so he could relax for a while and have a couple of drinks before dying. That’s all he wanted to get out of it. He thought he was going to die anyway, so his obstacle wasn’t that great…
Sybil: Oh I thought he was trying to get the Fem Bot…
Lea: Yeah.
Sybil: But – why?
Lea: I wasn’t even invested in that.
Sybil: I wasn’t either. I didn’t really care.
Lea: I wasn’t invested in anybody. Maybe I wanted to see the Master Bot (Simon Maiden) ‘feel’. But even then, he actually gave expressions of feelings from the beginning of the play anyway, so it was like he didn’t have far to go. I think that’s what was the problem was – there was a lot of ‘telling’. “Look, I’m feeling this”, but I didn’t feel that any of the work was going on underneath. And as you said, maybe it all misfired and things just weren’t hitting, but – it’s hard. Obviously a lot of the characters were robots, but…
Sybil: But still.
Lea: But still, as a robot, you know? I don’t know… it never connected. I was so watching it from the exterior.
Sybil: Yes, and again, I think that was my problem. On one hand they’re saying, here are robots, they don’t feel; and on the other hand, they’re expressing feelings – and they were expressing them and not feeling them… it was just weird…
Lea: You know what, we know that this show could be better, this concept could be done better and you would feel something.
Sybil: Yeah. Yeah. Yep. So, um… not ‘laugh out loud funny’. I’m sorry Aussie Theatre, I disagree. It’s disappointing. It’s our first Tamarama show that we haven’t liked.
Lea: Sad face for Tamarama.
Sybil: Look they got up in the face of, what I suspect was, a very cold audience.
Lea: Exactly, and so it’s not that I don’t appreciate what they did, they’ve got up there and they’ve given of themselves, theatre is not an easy gig. But from the overall perspective of my enjoyment in the audience… I can’t fake enthusiasm for it.
Sybil: What’s so ironic is the whole show is about Art. And in a post-modern, slightly ironic way they were discussing Art and the meaning of Art, and there was quite a lot of self-referential stuff going on…
Lea: Yes yes yes yes yes.
Sybil: Yet they didn’t necessarily achieve good Art.

IN SUMMARY

Lea: An interesting concept and worth seeing to enjoy the debate amongst your friends after the show. Perhaps we just went on a bad night.
Sybil: Not my cuppa tea. Room to improve, Tamarama. Room. To. Improve.

WHERE WE HAD POST SHOW DRINKS: Bondi Pavilion Theatre Bar. Why stray far on a cold Winter’s night?
OUR HANGOVER STATUS: As clear as a world without humans for Sybil (she’s on a detox), slightly rusty for Lea, after meeting friends in town after the show.
MORE INFORMATION:
http://rocksurfers.org/robots/