Archive: Issue No. 84, August 2004

A top-heavy nurse in cricket pads and dangling overhead light pack struggles to aim a fire breathing generator in a duel with a whip-cracking foreman. All this whilst the clown girl tries hard to give us some light musical relief, but she only has one jig.

It's a wild and confusing beginning. All I know at this point is that the foreman's an arse and mine's frozen to the concrete - it's night time, outdoors at The Grahamstown Festival! There's scaffolding and a scattering of objets de something-or-other, whose purpose will soon unfold before me in a bellowing cacophony of righteous noise pollution as Mark O' Donovan's Odd Enjinears go to work in their street theatre performance of 'Ten Two One'.

And it all happens at once, to the ear-splitting sound of an eight-headed foghorn and the ringing of a phone. The moneymaking machine springs to life like the monster it is. On the scaffolding, the 'secretary' emerges from her pupate sleeping bag on the first floor in a blind rush of make-up.

Down below, some kind of de-contamination process, involving lots of cling wrap, an umbrella and a smoke machine, hampers the emerging worker's struggle into overalls which have loads of shakers attached to great effect. His job is to flatten cans tossed to him by the aforementioned 'secretary' who's now also trying to paint an apple red with a toothbrush.

It's impossible to describe all the events here and their underlying connection to the whole, but the plot seems to be a loose kind of 'what goes around comes around' rise up the corporate ladder (literally) only to find it's the hand of capitalism which is pulling all the strings. It's multi-media in its crudest form - all haphazard industrial sound track, wonderfully bowed, plucked and bashed to emotional effect on 'instruments' welded together for the performance. With gutter down-pipes for bass lines and an engine room of drums, the foreman 'conducts' this production line.

Its five o'clock and the boss spits out a golf ball from his little pink piggy on the top floor as payment to the worker who duly goes home to feed his cowbell clucking chickens. The night brings dreams of persecution and a glimpse into the future via an animated slide show projected onto a sheet fixed to the scaffolding - the boss falls from grace and his ivory tower to be eaten by giant hens. Or something like that.

There's a great scene here where the ever-enthusiastic clown girl and her concertina are chased right out of the show into the distance by the foreman. This brings an element of horizontal scale into the performance, something the Odd Enjinears haven't played with before.

The second day at work starts out much like the first. But, after a wee bit of see saw with the secretary and being winched into some new threads, our upwardly mobile African gentleman is set to de-throne and demote his pale-faced nemesis. As he ascends one step at a time, there is a dramatic tolling of the bell, the unwinding and spiralling down of fireballs as the frantic boss plummets to the ground in a heap. Crump. As he slowly picks himself, and a broom up off the floor, so the faceless mask he once wore is handed to his successor. The King is dead, long live the King.