I would imagine that many of the sketches in Land Before Swine came from the cast sitting around after studying medicine for too long and coming up with ‘What if…’ scenarios. What if a bunch of chess pieces had the night off and decided to go to a nightclub? What if the Socrates, Archimedes and Pythagoras actually came from the Western suburbs of Sydney? What if Connex had Business Class? What if Where’s Wally didn’t like being searched for all the time and just wanted to be left alone?
The Med Revue is an annual sketch show complete with live band and mini-musical. It’s a bit of a Melbourne Uni institution, dating back, like many of these Melbourne Uni institutions (Farrago, Prosh Week), about eighty years. Generally, the sketches have little to do with the title, which acts like a gag in itself, parodying movie titles in the way porn movies do sometimes; the 2007 Med Revue Dancing with the Tsars for example, or 2003’s A Fish Called Rwanda.The sketches themselves are strung together fairly loosely, their positioning in the show probably based more the easiest way of integrating the many costume changes than anything else, while the musical lends the whole thing a bit more meat and spine. This year it’s “Ned Kelly: the Musical”, and though it’s not as laugh-out-loud funny as most of the sketches, it does provide respite. Sitting through two hours of disparate sketches and no binding element would probably earn a restless audience and an ideas-strapped cast.
The quality of the sketches varies with the topics, and the production could very easily have shaved out several of the weaker ones from this already very long production and been stronger for it. There aren’t too many of these, however, and when the sketches are good, they’re fantastic – highly imaginative, often hilarious, easily digestible bites of comedic theatre.
There are the horrible puns that everyone gets that illicit, bad-joke thrill from; the random and unpredictable conclusions; the topical parodies and snide references to popular culture; and many ideas or scenarios I’m sure everyone’s been thinking, but that needed a good Med Revue to be expressed. The speed dating gods, or “Speed Diety”, was a favourite of mine, along with the amazing reasoning loop one of the characters embarked upon, which eventually lead him to the conclusion that women’s liberation would result in birds and pigs coming crashing down from the sky and crushing his wife to death.
The Land Before Swine does make for a good night out. It’s long, so bring some popcorn (or maybe just some proverbial popcorn – don’t know if they let food into the Union Theatre), but its hilarity sustains its length. Most of all, the cast look like they’re having a ball, which means the audience has fun, and then all the profits go to charity, and a grand Melbourne Uni institution lives another year. Really, everyone wins.
Review by Zoe Barron
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Posted Tuesday 15 September, 2009. Updated Tuesday 15 September, 2009.
