In The Open Work, Umberto Eco writes, ‘In every century, the way that artistic forms are structured reflects the way in which science or contemporary culture views reality.’ Oh No! Satan Stole My Pineal Gland! is particularly reflective of its time; in a post-truth, alienating, and atomised world, its structure relies on a type of Dadaist non-logic. Stories become dreams, scenes bleed together, and the circular passage of characters from onstage to off becomes unsettlingly rhythmic. It is a work that accepts surrealism as a natural condition of contemporary existence; as a result, its non sequiturs and strange juxtapositions take on an internal coherence. Where another production might ham up the strangeness of its jokes, Oh No! Satan Stole My Pineal Gland!’s comedy is mature, tight, and self-reflexive, and all the funnier for it.

Lou Wall, Liam Maguire, Sarah Fitzgerald, and Natesha Somasundaram in Oh No! Satan Stole My Pineal Gland! (photograph by Alexis Desaulniers-Lea)

Cults are where lonely people go to feel part of something. But in Oh No! Satan Stole My Pineal Gland! even this locus of extreme connection fails to bridge the gaps in human isolation. The show’s nameless characters are the embodiment of millennial cultural fascinations: sneering at pop culture while obsessively consuming it, hooked on podcasts with ads for memory-foam pillows, boycotting lolly snakes because of their unethical red dye, fixated on socialism without taking any real action. The only conversations that take off in the production are those that trade content gleaned from elsewhere. When characters begin to extemporise about their most individual, human experiences, everyone else seeks a quick exit from the scene. This occurs particularly when people start to describe their own dreams.

In the first section of the production, a talking LED panel, acting as a kind of digital siren, tries to lure cultists to their deaths in the pond surrounding their little park. ‘You should go for a swim,’ it purrs. And in what goes on to be a running joke of the production, ‘What an interesting dream.’ The tedium of hearing someone else’s dream becomes a symbol of the broader social gaucheness of sharing personal intimacies as a communication strategy. While the characters vogue their way out of these conversations, the show itself is particularly interested in the dream as a form of logic. The breakdown of the set and the bleeding of story between remembered dream and reality create a space where memory becomes unstable and absurdity becomes possibility. We are never quite sure whether Satan really walks among us.  

How can you start a revolution when you can’t even make a human connection with a single person?

Sarah Fitzgerald is the unfortunate cultist of the show’s title. She hasn’t slept for weeks. Somasundaram, having discovered some latent telekinetic powers, diagnoses her problem: she’s missing her pineal gland. After a wonderfully absurd dance lecture on the function of this pea-shaped section of brain from Liam Maguire, Fitzgerald relates the story of how this happened. She was in bed, she says, and Satan was playing the violin. She relates Satan teaching her how to just play without trying to be good, their budding friendship, their stint as housemates, and how the relationship fell slowly but inexorably apart. The simplicity of the writing here is the key to a surprisingly moving description of the contemporary failure of communication and connection. It just so happens that Satan took part of her brain while moving out. It happens. Also, she can’t stop thinking about socialism now. Or is it Marxism? Or communism? In one of the show’s perfectly judged moments of fourth-wall breaking, she stares directly into the audience just at the moment when we’re all trying to remember the difference. She is rewarded with a peal of laughter.

These characters talk about class warfare a lot. Worshipping Satan seems to go hand in hand with a sudden interest in socialism. Maguire strums a series of Bob Dylan-esque songs about Marx and the desire to murder the comfortable classes. I was reminded of my Twitter feed, the shortfire tweets demanding the burning down of capitalist patriarchy, that seem never to translate into anything approaching activity. This idea runs as an undercurrent throughout Oh No! Satan Stole My Pineal Gland! – how can you start a revolution when you can’t even make a human connection with a single person?

The comedy in the production is tightly physicalised by Lou Wall and Jean Tong’s direction. Both have a solid history of genre-breaking, politically savvy works that use comedy to unpack society, including Lou Wall’s Drag Race and Tong’s Romeo is Not the Only Fruit and hungry ghosts. They are the ideal facilitators for writer Kirby Medway’s brand of absurdism. The direction brings the sense of physical strangeness needed to make the text sing. Gestures become abstracted and unmoored from communicational aids; they drift into dance moves. The effect amplifies the sense of the difficulty of interpersonal relations. Julia Spizzica’s costume and Ellie Kent’s set tie the world together with wit and bite. This is a team to keep a close eye on in future; they’re making some of Melbourne’s most exciting and interesting independent work.

When Satan finally arrives onstage, in the towering form of Lou Wall, outfitted in clawed red gloves and a striped tracksuit, it turns out that even she is struggling to get by. She’s having fewer and fewer parties every year, and attendance is flagging. The lord of darkness herself is figuring out the complexities of long work hours and housemate dramas. Medway’s answer to an all-powerful deity is a Satan who’s finding the modern world as hard as the rest of the characters. When Somasundaram receives a solo audience with her and finally meets the one person who remembers her Gilmore Girls episode and its attendant sense of the cosmic possibility of connecting with another person, the effect is surprisingly moving.

Oh No! Satan Stole My Pineal Gland! wields its comedy chops with style and precision, and proves a riotous night out. Its tacit questioning of class and connection moors its absurdity in real attentiveness to modern disconnection. It is an excellent example of the vital and surprising work happening beyond Melbourne’s main stages.

Oh No! Satan Stole My Pineal Gland!, directed by Jean Tong and Lou Wall, is being performed at the Melbourne Trades Hall as part of the Melbourne Fringe Festival until 29 September 2019. Performance attended: September 22.