The lights dimmed and a double bass player among a small group of accompanists plucked out an eerily disjointed sequence of notes.
“And what do you think?” she asked, still looking straight ahead.
“I think your father was an inspired writer.”
“You do?”
She seemed to want him to say more, so he obliged.
“That book is very well regarded in Germany and Austria, I hear.”
“Who would have thought it? All the time my father was a German poet, pretending to be an Australian madman. Just goes to show you.”
The curtain went up on a set designed to evoke a cross–section of the Eastern Arcade. One could see along the centre of the arcade, and into the interiors of a bordello on one side and the Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities on the other, both of which were pushed out on slight angles so that they protruded towards the audience. The Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities was crowded with body parts and model corpses half-hidden behind black veils. A drumbeat joined the double bass and a roundish man, characteristically made-up with white face paint and dark, purplish rings under his eyes, sauntered through the displays towards the door just as a pair of unsuspecting women were making their way down the centre of the arcade. The music stopped with a clash of cymbals. The man welcomed them into the museum, gave them a short speech about the educational benefits of the display and proceeded to reveal the models as, one by one, he flung the black veils into the air, giving a description of the particular sexual disease depicted each time. The two women screamed and drew back in horror with each new revelation of sickness and malformation. At the same time the audience mimicked their hysteria in a raucous cacophony of shrieks and laughter.
“They do have good lungs, I’ll give them that,” Ondine said over the noise of the crowd.
When the two women had regained some composure the man, who called himself Dr Podmore, blew on a whistle summoning half-a-dozen flunkeys from the wings – dwarfs, hunchbacks and other grotesques. Again the women screamed at the top of their lungs, and the audience roared with laughter as the withered little men grabbed at their legs and hands, snarling like vicious dogs.
“Now, my dears,” the doctor said ominously, “I invite you to join my little show.”
He drew a scalpel out of his jacket and twirled it expertly, suggesting a deft hand in foul play. One of the women wrenched herself free of the homicidal flunkeys and raced back into the arcade, her eyes searching vainly for help. But it was too late for her companion. As the double bass player tried to imitate the sound of a beating heart, the retracting blade of the fake scalpel sliced into the neck of the captured woman. The other woman ran to the front of the stage where she stood facing the audience, and let out an ear-splitting scream that vibrated through the fittings around the walls of the auditorium. The scream hung in the air for what seemed like a full minute as Dr Podmore butchered his victim. People wailed and hid their eyes. At the very moment when they could take no more, when horrified laughter and genuine terror had pushed the shuddering audience to the limit of its endurance, the scream stopped, the curtain fell on Act One and the lights went up, leaving the usually staid theatre-goers of Melbourne convulsed in their seats, afraid to look each other in the eye.
Even Ondine was red with laughter, though she quickly regained her composure and resumed her cynical air. Hamish was already making notes for the review he’d write the following day.
“Well then, what do you think?” Ondine said as people stood up, still recovering their senses of balance and proportion. “It’s trashy, but I’ll grant it a certain primal dignity. The screaming at least. I feel for these women though. I don’t know how Paul gets them to do it. He’s even tried to talk his own wife into it. Imagine.”
“All I have to do is describe it,” Hamish replied. “A plot summary and a brief account of how a few old women fainted and I’ve done my job. Don’t you read the papers these days?”
“Not really.”
“Well they don’t give you much scope for an opinion.”
“But if you had one what would it be? You’re evading me, Hamish.”
“If you want my opinion then here it is.
Grand Guignol
is not art in any conventional sense. It’s not simply entertainment either. It’s an expression, a clumsy expression perhaps, of the
thing.
The thing that underpins us – us as decent, orderly citizens, I mean. There.”
“Yes. I understand you perfectly. The thing. If we wanted to be even more perverse we could call it
das Ding.
But even better to phrase it in some utterly unintelligible, inhuman language. The language of things themselves. Anyway, that’s all very well. It’s just that I don’t believe you, unless by ‘thing’ you mean woman, some man’s fantasy of eternal night, like in my father’s awful poetry. It’s all academic. I suppose if people want bread and circuses they can have them, though we have too much of both if you ask me.”
She cut herself short as the lights dimmed again and the curtain went up. In the Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities Dr Podmore unveiled his latest exhibit to his gang of deformed helpers. It was the body of the woman he had just murdered in Act One, cut open and displayed as an anatomical Venus.
“How on earth?” a voice whispered in the audience.
The doctor turned his attentions to the flunkeys who let the woman from the first act get away, whipping them with a long piece of cane as they cowered into the corners of the set. At the same time two policemen walked down the centre of the arcade and knocked on his door. The doctor gave some hasty hand signals and the horde of dwarfs and hunchbacks quickly concealed itself behind the models and display cases.
“How can I help you, officers?” the doctor said, welcoming them in.
“You’re under arrest, Dr Podmore.”
“Don’t you find it prosaic?” Ondine whispered to Hamish. “It’s dull, plodding stuff.”
“But, officers, surely you have a warrant?”
“Under arrest for the abduction and assault of Miss Pixie Franklin.”
“Abduction and assault?” said the doctor. “I can show you her body if you like. Then you’ll have a bit more to go on than the say-so of a scatterbrained girl.”
He gestured towards the anatomical Venus and the policemen both craned their heads to get a better look. The doctor beckoned and they followed him deeper inside. The door closed behind them. As the accompanists cranked out a few frenetically disjointed flurries, a multitude of tiny hands and angry mouths fastened upon the policemen, dragging them to the ground amidst desperate, panicked cries and groans.
Paul used the stage trick he first saw performed by Wedelkind in Hamburg. With their backs to the audience the dwarfs tossed up little pieces of raw meat and bits of papier–mâché soaked in red wax and dye, creating the impression that the two policemen were being torn to pieces. The audience screamed and shrank in revulsion from the carnage in front of it. In the background the steady beat of a drum created the atmosphere of a primitive ritual. The doctor capered with glee.
Meanwhile, in the bordello opposite, which had hitherto been shrouded in darkness, a dim lamp lit up a luxuriously appointed sitting room. A buxom brothel madam, hair swept up into a pompadour, presided over a harem of women draped upon velvet-covered couches.
Suddenly the woman from Act One appeared again at the top of the stage, in the centre of the arcade, leading a mob of concerned citizens, which included a priest, a tram conductor and some armed soldiers. They ran to the front of the stage, pausing before the audience in a posture of collective alarm, as if startled by the last groans of the mutilated policemen, who were now revealed to the audience as a mound of torn uniforms and bleeding body parts.
The woman banged on the door of the Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities. The flunkeys scattered, retreating and exiting unnoticed by the audience, whose attention was now focused on the bodies and the startled Dr Podmore, who sniffed danger in the air. The mob burst into the room, sparking a mad chase around the models, which sent bodies tumbling in a comically arranged sequence of choreographed mayhem. Finally the pursued doctor managed to escape into the arcade, where he flew directly to the door of the brothel.
“Madam Mazel,” he cried. “Please. Mercy.”
The door opened and the doctor fell panting onto the scarlet carpet at the feet of the four women.
Meanwhile the mob spilled back into the arcade. The priest banged on the brothel door, demanding the fugitive.
“Why should we listen to you?” the madam said stubbornly.
“Listen to me then,” said the woman from Act One boldly, assuming command once again. “The man you harbour is a brutal murderer, responsible for countless mysterious deaths in this very arcade. Can’t you smell the blood on him?”
The madam sniffed the air, catching something rank that had her twisting her face and recoiling in disgust. The doctor cowered in fear.
“No, don’t listen,” he implored. “They’re a rabble.”
“Smell it!” the woman cried.
The light changed to a lurid green, highlighting the pale faces of the actors and exaggerating their gestures.
The three prostitutes stood up lazily and formed a circle around the doctor. He tried to get to his feet, but was pushed back down.
“No,” he shuddered, his voice faltering.
The women closed in. As the lights went dead and a cacophony of piercing shrieks rang out over the audience, the dim outline of flailing limbs could be seen hacking away at the darkness.
When the lights went up again several minutes later, the violence of the screams still echoed through the theatre. The curtain had fallen and the shaken audience was white with shock.
The next evening two separate articles in the
Melburnian
made mention of the play:
Those of us who experienced the opening of Melbourne’s own
Grand Guignol
at the Bijou Theatre on Bourke Street will be left in no doubt that the theatrical culture of the city has shifted decisively. No longer will it be possible to produce romantic melodramas or even thrillers, such as the recent adaptations of Conan Doyle, without a distinct sense of anachronism.
The Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities,
written and directed by Paul Walters, has established the theatre of fear in our city. Last night theatre-goers shuddered, screamed, and fainted with fright as they watched the bestial side of human nature dragged out of the shadows and displayed in full view. The play adapts a long tradition of Gothic horror to the local scene. Readers of Poe and his more extreme French disciples will recognise elements of this tradition in this play about a mad doctor who murders the patrons of his anatomical museum to enhance his collection with their corpses.
The popular spectacles of history have not been without their share of gore. Those of us who think that these modern times have dispensed with the need for a bit of public blood-letting need only step into the Bijou Theatre to see that the old desires die hard. Our respectable theatre patrons, who only a week ago might have been content to debate Hamlet’s madness until they were blue in the face, will today be recovering their battered senses. It will remain for the prudish and hypocritical among them to insist that
Grand Guignol
is theatre for the masses. The truth is that even the most moralistic of us seek out violent, prurient entertainment where fear and revulsion merely veil a secret desire to witness the unthinkable.
Anyone who has walked the length of the Eastern Arcade of late will be in no doubt as to its unsavoury qualities. Running between Little Collins and Bourke Streets behind the Eastern Market, itself a perpetual eyesore on the face of the city, the Eastern Arcade is a haven of vice where gamesters, pornographers, prostitutes and petty criminals of every imaginable ilk congregate to hatch their sordid schemes. Among the dubious businesses operating there we found a wine saloon, a billiard hall, a bookshop specialising in obscene publications, a photographer’s studio, a phrenologist, a palm reader and no less than three brothels, barely concealed behind soiled sheets of red velvet hanging in their windows. Prostitutes, moreover, feel no disinclination to solicit in the arcade itself and no doubt the procession of shadowy characters constantly making their way through it are drawn by this market in human flesh.
Melbourne’s arcades were once a symbol of the city’s prosperity, and every bit the equal of the Burlington Arcade in London. How regrettable it is that they have fallen into such disrepair and neglect, and are now infested with the detritus of the city. The Eastern Arcade has become a breeding ground for the miscreants from which all good parents should hope to shield their young. A sensational play now doing the rounds could not have been closer to the mark in imagining the arcade as the home of obscenities dredged out of the gutters of modern life. We urge the board of city planning, currently addressing the issue of slum housing in Carlton and Fitzroy, to turn its attention to this blight and consider correctives before its moral influence is irrevocable.
By the middle of the next week
The Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities
had warranted write-ups in the city’s leading dailies:
The Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities
has somehow slipped past the moral censors of the city and is drawing packed houses. Apparently the public is only too willing to be deceived by the trickery of red wax, retracting blades, and the odd piece of butcher’s meat thrown in for good measure. A quack doctor in the foyer pretends to check hearts before the performance and is apparently on hand in case of heart failure during it. The show is a curiosity in its own right. Grotesquely exaggerated performances by a talentless and justifiably unknown cast would merely be amusing if the content were not so horrific. A pack of bloodthirsty dwarfs, whose fate is still unresolved at the end of the play, is too ridiculous to comment upon, and the amount of deafening screaming is only matched by the carnage. The final scene of the play, where the special nastiness of the playwright’s imagination comes to the fore, is a particular outrage to public decency. The thought of young people or women being exposed to the Bacchanalian obscenity of this conclusion is enough to suggest that the play itself should be shut down without further notice. We refer it, without further ado, to the city’s Indecent Literature Committee, and imagine prosecution pending.