No Pay? No Way!

by Dario Fo and Franca Rame

in a new adaptation by Marieke Hardy

Sydney Theatre Company

Royal Opera House, Sydney

Dario Fo and Franca Rame's 1970s farce about capitalism and the cost of living crisis may be half a century old but gains a delicious contemporary relevance in this new adaptation by Australian writer Marieke Hardy and directed by Sarah Giles, currently in its second staging by the Sydney Theatre Company. 

Working-class housewife Antonia (McElhinney) has just returned from the supermarket where the doubling of prices overnight has resulted in a riot by irate local women who have promptly stormed off with produce they simply refuse to pay for. With the police hot on their pursuit, Antonia ropes in timid neighbour Margherita (Emma Harvie) to hide the ill-gotten gains from her husband Giovanni (Glenn Hazeldine), a staunch trade unionist and stickler for rules. What follows is a madcap romp involving pregnancies, saints, coffins and some very confused people. 

In classic farce fashion, what starts out as mildly bizarre quickly moves into the absurd and then the downright ridiculous, buoyed by manic energy. The cast do a great job in keeping up the tidal wave of laughs with particularly strong turns by McElhinney as the spunky, forthright Antonia who insists that the vegetables have been "liberated" rather than stolen and Hazeldine in a side-splitting scene about olives that one is very unlikely to forget. Special mention must go to Aaron Tsindos who plays a succession of minor characters with a perfect poker face, almost daring us to laugh at his newly tacked on cap or jacket. 

Hardy retains the Italian period setting and character names but the cast speak with contemporary Australian accents, somehow reinforcing the fact that this is very much an issue for today. After all, who hasn't been mildly horrified the last time they looked at supermarket prices? What I found worked less well was the attempt to inject a meta-theatrical element into the script. In the beginning of the second act, we are informed that the stage hands, having apparently been inspired by the play, have marched off demanding better wages. The hapless actors are forced to soldier on and move their own sets. It's an amusing nod to recent strikes in the theatre industry but ends up collapsing the audience's suspension of disbelief, causing the second half of the show to drag. 

All in all, No Pay? No Way! makes for an entertaining and hilarious night out. Charles Davis's gritty apartment set, pushed right to the edge of the stage, richly conveys the lived-in world of the downtrodden masses and a rousing finale song turns this tale of rioting women into a much larger political commentary about the complex, challenging world we live in.

The Crystalwords score: 3/5