Stunt Double | The Farm

[Warning - some spoilers lie ahead!]

Stunt Double at its simplest is about making movies. It's set on a film set, it's about actors, it explores Australian masculinity in the film industry. At its most complex it's a series of beautiful and atmospheric dream sequences about violence and ego and how the pressure of performing under exploitative systems can cause psyches to shatter.

Stitching those two threads together is no mean feat and while a few points of the show definitely had me confused, for the most part the abstract and absurd was paired with the grounded and humorous in a way that had me truly on the edge of my seat.

The audience is welcomed onto the set of an ocker aussie action film with open arms and the booming voice of a narrator. Volunteers planted in the audience are pulled out of their seats and onto the set as extras, and the whole room turns into overlapping voices getting ready to shoot a scene. The director explains the scene to the actors, actors are talking to the extras, who are busy adjusting props or stretching.

The energy invited the audience to giggle and chat quietly as well, and the buzz and the rhythm of that scene only escalated during the actual fight which was brilliantly performed by the two actors playing the stunt doubles. 

I felt a genuine pang of sympathy for the stunt doubles when, at the end of this scene, they were revealed behind a piece of furniture,  sitting in their final positions, wrung out, ignored and exploited. I also wasn’t quite sure if I was supposed to laugh or not. A few giggles escaped from the audience as this tonal shift became clear and I found it a little disorienting. Once I had adjusted to these shifts a little later in the show, I really enjoyed the abstract addition of the dance scenes. It was just this first one that pulled me out of the experience a bit. 

Stunt Double continues to bounce back and forth between the film set, and slower, sometimes violent choreography. It was excellently performed, very atmospheric and I really enjoyed the way the dance scenes allowed me to more deeply understand the characters without stuffing in a lot of exposition dialogue. 

There were several scenes in the show that absolutely took my breath away but one of them was a fight scene that was placed in one of the most abstract parts of the plot. 

Two characters sit in a car. (Who knows if they were actors or characters, if they were dreaming or awake?)  The lighting is dim and the engine’s not turning over. Slowly the stage fills with stunt doubles in identical clothing while a guitar riff thrums quietly in the background. The stunt doubles close in, the characters in the car get nervous, the music gets louder and I turned to my friend sitting next to me and whispered, 'oh my god I think they're gonna fight their way out.' The scene exploded into a perfect, frantic homage to b-movies that had me grinning ear to ear.  

That feeling of anticipation, of knowing you were about to see something that was purely and intensely fun, was my favorite part of this production.