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Australia feeds off narratives of survival and madness: Mad Max, The Rover, Wake in Fright, even Snowtown, have all spooked audiences into imagining what they could endure. In new play AutoCannibal, presented by Theatre Works and Oozing Future, feeding is the main premise.
Set in a dystopian future after an environmental collapse, the play has the tagline: “What will we eat when we’ve consumed it all?”
Audiences will need strong stomachs, because the answer in the first instance is “bodily fluids”. You might guess from the title where to next.
Mitch Jones, a master of physical theatre, is the sole performer here. He’s directed by his partner Masha Terentieva, herself a circus performer, with impressively oppressive sound design from Bonnie Knight. His two most recent shows, Bunker (2016) and Relax: Everything’s Fucked (2017), had similarly nihilistic themes, but the concept of AutoCannibal came to him in the midst of grief over the death of a close friend. In its bleakness, this play allows us to explore a world deprived of all its richness.
Jones’ character is the AutoCannibal himself – an otherwise nameless former news anchor, and now seemingly the last man standing. His psyche is on a pendulum swing between survival and self-harm. He’s periodically tempted by the saws and knives that descend from the sky, tormenting him with ideas of self-harm and self-feeding. The set itself is made of scaffolding – which Jones navigates with acrobatic prowess – as if only the bones of buildings are left.
Self-harm, here, becomes a metaphor for environmental destruction. Fittingly, the preview of the show fell the day after David Attenborough told a British parliamentary committee that Australia was an “extraordinary” example of a country where people in power remained climate-change deniers despite facing some of the worst effects of global heating. How apt that the AutoCannibal is a former news reader: that neutral mouthpiece of bad tidings.
As there are no natural resources left, the AutoCannibal harvests plastic bags. Once the disposable symbols of over-consumerism, they’re now saved and put to every kind of use; even sexual gratification.
At one point, he toys with suicide by pulling a bag over his head and hyperventilating, before stuffing the whole thing into his mouth. In a grimly entertaining scene, he sits at a mock desk and reads a news bulletin, his words choked and muffled. At another moment, he play-acts what it is to be human, as if trying to remember, gurning his way through expressions of stupidity, selfishness, ignorance and refusal to listen – all the qualities that got humankind to this point in time. There’s an endearing way to Jones’ cartoonish physicality, echoing the pathos of Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp and the frustrated desires of Tom & Jerry’s Tom Cat, and he’s often met with uncontrollable laughter from the peanut gallery.
After cutting his teeth with Circus Oz, Jones forged his style by performing in fetish clubs, where self-harm is part of the BDSM tool kit, and has previously staple-gunned himself and pierced his face with hooks. At the end of the hour tonight, he’s covered in sweat and looking exhausted.
In an outrageous case of publicity clickbait – or, at best, a disingenuous conflation of the actor with the character – it had been promised that “Mitch Jones chops himself up, cooks himself, and then eats himself on stage”. This is untrue – but it’s probably not accurate to say that no Joneses were harmed during the making of this play.
• AutoCannibal is on at TheatreWorks until 21 July
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