Tim Finn, Abi Tucker & Brett Adams in The Fiery Maze. Photograph by Pia Johnson.
Twenty years in the making, the collaboration between singer/songwriter Tim Finn and poet Dorothy Porter is an intoxicating production that spears through its story of love, not as a concept, but rather a force. An almost perverse natural fit, Finn’s music theatricalises the searing poetry of Porter (whose critically acclaimed verse novel The Monkey’s Mask was adapted to/for film, theatre and radio).
Finn approached Porter to ‘write some songs’, originally recorded with performer Abi Tucker, who, haunted by the original recordings, approached Finn in 2014, reigniting The Fiery Maze. Novelist Andrea Goldsmith, Porter’s partner, joined the collaboration after Porter’s death in 2008, shaping the dramatic narrative, and, in the final production, has sculpted Porter’s lyrics – and love story – around the fiery armature of Finn’s music.
The Fiery Maze is Finn’s first Malthouse Theatre production and follows on from his adaptation of Madeleine St John’s novel for the theatre in Ladies in Black, where his canny lyricism transported the late 50s Australian context to salient comment on social issues. But here Finn has fused the cosmic – and comical – force of Porter’s lyrics with her poetic apprehension of the everyday: Ballarat, a source of an unbounded affair, charts the turbulent – and, at times, discordant – path of love in tight, droll verse.
Finn’s music translates Porter’s avowed love of rock music – betrayed by lyrics like ‘incense for Jimi [Hendrix]/whisky for Janis [Joplin]/black candles for Jim [Morrison],’ who themselves form a kind of holy trinity and yearning paean of rock music throughout the performance’s lyricism. Twined with the narrative thread of the passionate romance, the storyline is told as much within the lyrics and music of the songs as between them – the shifts and progressions give a directness of feeling that swells, and despairs, with the affair – the staccato-like New Friends [‘New Friends go snap crackle pop’] a seeming unwilling bedpartner to the haunting Black Water [‘And my devil’s they know where to find me but today I just don’t care’]. Designer, Nick Schlieper’s pared back set too facilitates the production’s immersive staging. Like its sparse set, the efficacy of the stage trio’s performance is hinged to the dramatic potency of Porter’s tight, often droll, verse (the elegy-like lyrics such as ‘Janis come down live for me/ I can party my short life long/ you don’t have to look for a drink in heaven’).
But the audience experience the production not by way of usual theatrical vernacular. Abi Tucker’s raw and insistent – and powerful performance – while vocalising a universal story of love, carries the clarity and directness of Porter’s language. Through lines as varied in tone and meaning as ‘I’m not afraid of dying/I like it when you drive too fast’, or ‘You’re my quiet seer/you make my pain disappear’, or ‘Now your bride doll is talking back – talking tough’, or ‘There’s a laughing space opening up in my head; time to stop worshipping the dead’, Tucker inhabits the performance. And, while the presence of Finn brings a gravitas to the production, it is Tucker’s ability to evoke the cogent intoxication of Porter’s lyrics that it derives its accent. Tucker brings an almost passionate reverie of love begun, and failing, spears it into the present – unreeling vulnerabilities and raw humanity. Under Anne-Louise Sarks direction, Tucker’s performance strikes at an authenticity, urgency and sense of desire-felt. She doesn’t perform the lyrics of lust and longing as much as spears love, dragging it from the shadows into the light, blistering and searing with all the blood and thunder inside her.
Running at 50 minutes, the performance is sung in entirety, with Tucker performing all songs backed by Finn on keyboards, guitar and percussion and Brett Adams on guitar. Not a straightforward concert performance, it’s irreverence of form might confuse audiences in its slippage between rock musical and Lieder-like song cycle. But, what The Fiery Maze achieves in its fusion of poetry and song pushes back against the limiting notion that any single art form can stake its claim through an assumption of exclusion.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
The Fiery Maze
Music by Tim Finn
Words by Dorothy Porter
Direction: Anne-Louise Sarks
Design: Nick Schlieper
Creative Consultant: Andrea Goldsmith
Performed by Brett Adams, Tim Finn, Abi Tucker
Malthouse Theatre
18 – 4 September 2016
