Massacre review: Wild and woolly protest piece from Portuguese outfit Colectivo 84 at La Mama

Cameron Woodhead

MASSACRE - Stone/Castro & Colectivo 84 - La Mama Courthouse - Until May 17

Local avant-garde outfit Stone/Castro have joined forces with Portuguese company Colectivo 84 to produce this wild and woolly protest piece, where the geopolitics and human rights violations surrounding East Timorese independence sit by side with devotion to thrash metal.

It's worth comparing Massacre to Black Lung Theatre's Doku Rai (2012). That work, rehearsed in an abandoned hotel in Dili and performed with a garage band from Timor, bound its post-punk aesthetic to mythic architecture. Amid the Dionysian release of music, it provided a narrative allegory that refracted the cycle of violence under consideration through the prism of local legend.

Massacre is a murkier affair. Its connections are less obvious and there are parts of it, like the opening sequence, when the show seems to devolve into little more than a mosh-pit for two. Not that that's unwatchable: Paulo Castro's demonic energy makes the prospect of him slam-dancing with himself more entertaining than you'd think.

But the sheer looseness of the conception leaves the audience all at sea. On a symbolic level, the interactions between Castro and John Romao​ (who appear to embody two aspects of Timor as well as colonial and regional players like Indonesia, Australia and Portugal) are utterly obscure.

The situation isn't helped by flights of self-indulgence. At one point, Castro invokes the administrative vagaries of running a theatre company, and goes into a towering rant that describes avant-garde Italian theatre director Romeo Castellucci​ creating a masterpiece in which he's attacked by dobermans. (Castellucci has his revenge, later, through a withering rejection letter.)

Such in-jokes are amusing to those in the know, but dissipate the febrile impact of the physical theatre and contribute to the feeling that the whole heavy-metal filter is an arbitrary frame imposed by the artists, rather than something that arises organically from the material.

Massacre eschews any easy messaging and possesses a visceral urgency, but it too much embroils us in chaos and confusion to critique events in East Timor in an intelligible way.

The Age – Photo: Massacre by Stone/Castro and Portuguese company Colective 84. Photo: Supplied