By Cameron Woodhead
Will Pony Cam take an actual chainsaw to Chekhov’s final play in The Orchard? While the ensemble members won’t give anything away, based on past form, it’s a distinct possibility.
Anything can happen at a Pony Cam show – that’s part of their unorthodox charm – though the performers might need to up power tools if they want to outdo Burnout Paradise, the Fringe hit that saw them take to treadmills and enlist audiences to help multitask through a list of increasingly outrageous chores (including submitting an arts grant application) against the clock.
Pony Cam will put a new spin on Chekhov’s The Orchard. Credit: Jason South
Slapstick scenes proliferated in that one; on one occasion in Edinburgh, a man leapt out of the audience to pash a performer on the lips, in a frenetic attempt to complete the final mission with only seconds remaining on the timer. The show’s chaotic scenario demanded presence from the performers too.
“You can be on autopilot,” says Claire Bird of Burnout Paradise, “but at the end of the day, you can’t autopilot your relationship with an audience that’s shaving your leg and feeding you bananas at the same time. You just can’t do that. You’ve got to be present.”
An emphasis on shared presence is baked into the company’s DNA. That’s unsurprising, given it was founded not long before the COVID pandemic, when the five ensemble members – Bird, Ava Campbell, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams – were at the Victorian College of the Arts together in 2019.
Pony Cam’s unorthodox practice was shaped by the young artists’ capacity to turn the extraordinary misfortune of Melbourne’s extended theatre shutdowns into a creative opportunity.
In Anything You Can Do, the ensemble sought to bring together the old and the young.Credit: Wild Hardt
“People talk about this show like it’s our ‘mainstage debut’,” says Weintraub uncertainly, “but in fact, it’s the first show we’ve made specifically for a theatre … largely because for the first few years, theatres were closed.
“We spent two years watching online art that couldn’t speak to its audience, that couldn’t relate to its audience,” he continues. “We developed a real desire to connect with people, and for that connection to be the very core of everything we make.”
From the outset, Pony Cam has been focused on overcoming forces that separate us. Anything You Can Do was made with a rag-tag group of seniors, all non-actors, as the ensemble sought to bring together the old and the young, “highly aware that generations were being segregated during COVID” for public health reasons, Weintraub says.
The company then spun the necessity of working outdoors into a large-scale participatory performance for younger audiences – Paradise Lots, an adolescent dystopia performed with teens in a car park at Northland Shopping Centre – and teamed with David Williams from Version 1.0 for Grand Theft Theatre, an elegant meditation on the ephemeral nature of live performance and how, as Williams puts it: “Memory is really theatre’s only tool for keeping itself alive.”
A response to Chekhov at the Malthouse strikes out in a new direction for the company.
Audiences were encouraged to step outside their comfort zones at the elaborate food theatre event, Feast, at The Substation last year. Some needed no encouragement. Actor Virginia Gay spent the entire show handcuffed beside me at the banquet table, hands pinioned behind her back, merrily exploring her submissive side.
As for the kinkiest marathon of all, Burnout Paradise, it has toured overseas, most recently to Ireland, where serendipitous lows and highs continue to strike. One night, a stray beach ball melted on an overhead light (“The stage manager rushed on and yelled: ‘Quick! Get the claw!’” says Bird); on another occasion in Edinburgh, Neil Patrick Harris volunteered to wax a performer’s leg during the show.
They do have a truly eclectic array of devised works under their belt, but a response to Chekhov at the Malthouse strikes out in a new direction for the company.
How is an outfit that’s more at home in community halls, pop-up fringe venues and car parks going to navigate making a show in a subsidised theatre? How will it approach Chekhov’s classic, with its tragicomic sense of stasis, of clinging to nostalgia in the face of radical societal change?
Feast by Pony Cam in 2024 was genuinely subversive and wildly kinky.Credit: Darren Gill
For Williams, there’s an irony in Chekhov writing “a comedy about people unable to accept coming change” months before his own death. Both Williams and Weintraub are fascinated by the sharpness of the playwright’s observations of human nature, though they hope the piece will resonate and speak to the moment without being didactic or telling anyone what to think.
Whatever idiosyncratic paths this show may take into Chekhov, it’s bound to be as important as it is entertaining. The searching clarity of Pony Cam’s aesthetic, and the considered philosophical approach to the process of theatre-making, anchor all the playfulness and the clowning and mark them out as strikingly original performance makers.
To my mind, they’re the most significant company to emerge from the VCA since The Hayloft Project launched the careers of Simon Stone, Anne-Louise Sarks and others a generation ago.
The only recommendation from the performers is to rock up to The Orchard early, before showtime. Weintraub hints at mysterious activities taking place. And what are these activities? Again, Pony Cam insists on preserving its mystique.
All Weintraub can tell us is: “We’re trying to be as faithful as we possibly can – without saying a single line of text from the play.”
The Orchard is on at Malthouse Theatre from August 5 to 16.
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