Tony McMahon, Inpress, May 14, 2008

I was dreading going to see my third Sisters Grimm production, Cellblock Booty. After Fat Camp and Bumtown, I knew I was going to have a supremely difficult task coming up with any more adjectives to describe this anarchic theatre company’s work. From memory, I’d already used ‘outrageous’ ‘offensive’ ‘hilarious’ irreverent’ and lines such as ‘like a fart at a funeral’ to describe their cutting edge craziness. Where, one might reasonably ask, does one go from there?

Luckily for me though, Cellblock Booty is something of a departure for maverick, manic geniuses Ash Flanders and Declan Greene, the driving forces behind Sisters Grimm. As the name of their company suggests, Flanders and Greene tell modern day, queer (in all senses of the word) fairy tales. Cellblock Booty is both a homage to and a meditation on the stupidity and exploitation of 70’s women prison films, the sort of play Quentin Tarantino might stage if he were a funny bloke and lived in Brunswick, sans his enormous coke habit.

While the Sisters’ previous work was more inspired by bad taste icon John Waters, Booty feels more like one of those perverse seventies collaborations between Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. One of the characters, the dastardly Matron, even has a German accent – naturally – and it’s a dead ringer for Morrissey’s favoured Udo Kier. The humour is still Out There, notably Connie’s smuggling efforts and ‘ball acting’ (trust me, you don’t wanna know) but there is a decidedly uncomfortable edge to this play, and the ending is a lot more downbeat than the Sisters’ previous work. Also, there’s noticeably less music, but the play is actually better for it. One walks away feeling both pleasantly corrupted and thinking a lot more about why.

Lines in Cellblock Booty are blurred beyond belief, and it’s hard to imagine going back now to a time when they weren’t. For example, a white woman (or maybe a man) plays a black woman, heavily charcoaled with the cliché meter turned all the way up to eleven. In this day and age.
See Cellblock Booty at any price. Don’t even worry about the freezing underground car park the play is held in. This is supremely important, albeit insane, theatre.