masticate > reviews
Drum Media Review | Film Ink Review
Urban Tales may be an acquired taste, but this hardworking crew with and eye for the nasty bits did a great job of tearing off hunks of "everyday experience", grinding it between their comedic jaws and spitting the crowd out the other side, sides aching from laughing so hard.
Since their first show "You’ll Eat It and You’ll Like It", Urban Tales has gone for the jugular. Nothing – and no one - is sacred. The sketch format is also a winner; perfectly suited to the pub environment where they stage their shows (and the beer soaked brains of the crowd they play to).
What has changed however, is the manner of delivery. After several sell-out seasons, Urban Tales is perfecting their craft. The ensemble cast work together extremely well, and it’s obvious to see they all thoroughly enjoy the company they keep. (I could, at this point, make half-cocked puns relating to "feeding each other creatively", but I think I’ve stretched the eating metaphor as far as it will go.)
Masticate opens with the signature ‘anti-scene’, a kind back stage peek at the inner workings of Urban Tales. This time, however, the cast is holding nothing back. It’s drug-addled brainwashed, sexually perverted shenaniagans all over the place, with producer Diana Fletcher as head honcho, and Trudi-Ann Tierney playing an edgy Enforcer. It’s a clever device. The scenes recur throughout the show, which could otherwise end in a dribble rather than a full-blown gobbie.
As with most sketch shows, some scenes work better than others. The Netballers (Slapper Gets Lucky), revealing the three male members of the cast discussing sex, RSL action and abortion, is a real hoot. Fizzy Mums has Rebecca Tully and Muffy Potter going all Shirley Pervis on us as they batter their little darlings into Physical Culture Stardom. Home movies is a spot-on send up of 70’s porn action: "Who could that be?" "It’s the Pizza Boy!"
I could go on, but I don’t want to give everything away. Urban Tales is a fantastic example of actors getting off their scrawny behinds and making a show for themselves – one that sells. It’s bloody Australian of them, I reckon. And it’s a beaut show too.
Elizabeth Bentley – Drum Media. Dec 2000
Theatrics: pub style
Urban Tales is an exciting young performance group hauling theatre
out of stuffy auditoriums, and dragging it into one of Australia's favourite places: the local pub. Driving forces Diana Fletcher and Trudi Ann Tierney lay down their master-plan to FILMINK.
Theatre in a pub. It may sound like an obvious combination, but until now, not too many folks have given it a whirl. Now it seems the Urban Tales gang have cracked a new niche market, deconstructing traditional ideas of theatre to bring Sydney a brand of accessible and comic sketches in bar and restaurant environments with the hope of appealing to the masses.
Frustrated with the confines of mainstream theatre, the tradition, the over-priced tickets and the rigid structure of performance, Diana Fletcher and Trudi-Ann Tierney devised Urban Tales. After two successful shows, "Swallow" and "You'll Eat it and You'll Like it", the team are set to explode into the Cat and Fiddle Hotel with their latest orally fixated spectacular, "Masticate".
"We were really upset with the present landscape of theatre," says Fletcher. "I'd just been to see something and I'd paid seventy bucks and fell asleep In the middle of It 'cos it was so shit boring! I felt that it was a rehashed work of Shakespeare that I didn't think was relevant any more.
If you're gonna do the classics, do the classics, but I felt there was room for new, exciting and more relevant stuff as well. I just got sick of paying seventy bucks to go to the theatre and not have a good time!"
Urban Tales have been very well-received for their vibrant and fresh approach to theatre. Fletcher refers to the mad Shakespearean days of the Globe Theatre where the crowd included people from all walks of life thrust together and wreaking havoc as she explains the group's emphasis on entertaining the punters. "It was a hoo ha! That's what I think theatre should be - alive and kicking - not sitting in your seat in an auditorium full of people that are falling asleep," she says. "I don't think anyone should be too precious about theatre. Theatre can be in the street, it can be next to you while you're sitting on the bus, y'know, interaction between a couple of people. That's theatre - it's alive and it's breathing and it's got vitaiity and that's what we're hoping to bring to our work."
By putting their productions on in a pub environment, the Urban Tales brigade have found that people respond to their work more actively. There is no defined audience participation, but there is a certain interaction that makes every night exciting and different. "Because most of our scenes are drawn from life experience, people do identify with them," says Fletcher. "It becomes really accessible and I think that's where we have to go with theatre otherwise it's gonna die, and I'd hate to think that could happen ' "Masticate" will mark the first anniversary of Urban Tales and what better way to do so than to continue in their new theatrical tradition of highlighting inappropriate behaviour and bringing the punters a roaring good time.
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