Poetry is one of those things that barely anyone really likes. It’s unfortunate of course, because a true poet is almost always a true genius; which is why performance poetry was born. It sticks theatricality onto something that is intimate, passive, and too subtle for most to understand – making you slightly more inclined to pay attention.
Yet performance poetry has the uncanny ability to take away the beauty of the poems themselves, and with Cathy Bray’s Latitude Platitude, performed at the funky Glebe-style cafe, The Record Crate, poetry takes centre stage and performative show is left behind in the dust. We are left to ponder the words and not the staging. We are forced to listen and not to look. The poetry is what we’ve come to see, and it’s all we are given. This may be a difficult show for some people, when most audience members nowadays crave the fast-paced, polished and abrasive theatre vibe. (They want the show, and they want it now.) And while Bray’s performance lacks all this, it does make up for it in other ways. It is poetry, plain and simple.
Latitude Platitude crosses multiple poetry genres – haiku, rhyme, spoken word and narrative. It deals with the important and not-so-important issues. We wonder about politics, we hear about motherhood, and we laugh at religion. The show is littered with fantastic one-liners that make you giggle, such as “there are more than fifty shades of grey in my beaver alone,” and “there are only three poets in Australia making a living from poetry – Les Murray”. Cathy Bray, otherwise known as The Madwoman, is brash and honest about growing old and being a poet, and it’s refreshing to see that truthfulness and authenticity alive and well at the Fringe.
Latitude Platitude is all about poetry, meaning that there is not much of a show to see. It falls flat because of this. Bray reads from a script and moves from microphone to microphone so as to show that she is moving onto her next piece of poetry or to make an important point, yet this becomes difficult to follow. She would also benefit without the random table filled with wine glasses and books that sits at the back of the small stage, which becomes useful only twice during the show.
If this performance tried hard not to be a show, then we’d be even more blown away by Bray’s poetry. But this is The Fringe, and in order to get an audience, one must try their best to stand out like a sore thumb – but a beautiful and unique sore thumb at that. Bray does stand out, but only when she doesn’t try does she truly succeed.
Reviewed by Bridget Conway.
