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On a windy Monday afternoon, actor and singer Simon Burke stands outside the home where his family lived for his first 13 years of life, a two-storey cream Victorian terrace in inner-Sydney’s once raffish Paddington. Fifty years on, the wooden front door is unchanged.
At four, little Simon would sit on a letterbox here, pretending to play piano on this spiked wrought-iron fence. We gaze up at the jacaranda on the street, its purple spring flowers blooming above the power lines.
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It’s time: the Wharf Revue is exiting the stage after 25 years of political piss-takes and satirical skewerings, from songs about the unceasing weaponisation of refugees since the Tampa affair to shadow puppetry spotlighting the misogyny of the “ditch the witch” rally. Now, just like Joe Hockey celebrating a budget of health and welfare cuts with cigars, the Revue’s final satirical show will ignite memories of our greatest political nadirs.
Beginning in the Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf theatre in 2000, the Wharf Revue quickly became known for its annual touring show mashing Broadway belters and political assassinations. And every year they always had an abundance of material, given neither major party ever learned from the other’s machiavellian machinations.
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Suffering abounds in Adam Elliot’s dark and deadpan films. The Melbourne animator’s claymation characters overdose and lose testicles or imbibe on an array of poisons; they are assailed by strokes and lightning strikes. These beloved underdogs, the Oscar-winning film-maker says, are studies in human imperfection: “I’ve realised my films are about perceived flaws that often aren’t actually flaws.”
Elliot won his Oscar for the 2003 short film Harvie Krumpet, introducing the world to his surprisingly whimsical style. Global attention followed, and his first feature, 2009’s Mary and Max, starred Toni Collette, voicing a little girl who begins a pen pal friendship with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Max, a New Yorker with Asperger syndrome.
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