A charming and warmly communal theatrical experience.
asses.masses, playing at the Sydney Opera House as part of Sydney Festival, is somehow more ridiculous than it sounds. It’s a fever dream of rebellion, animal rights and drug taking, presented through a video game the audience collectively plays. With homages to history’s best known games, it’s easy to get lost in this interactive experience. But with the show running for nearly 8 hours, the experience should be tighter.
At the centre of asses.masses is a bizarre, opaque storyline. A donkey gathers his fellow asses to lead a protest against the humans enslaving them. All asses are appropriately named; Nice Ass, Sad Ass, Hard Ass, et cetera. The audience controls these asses as their protest explodes into a full-blown rebellion and man-on-donkey riots. They exert this control through a single PlayStation-esque controller at the front of the audience space; one player operates the controller as the audience verbally help them through the game.
It’s a group experience as much as it is an interactive one – it’s up to the audience to rotate between players, decide on intermission lengths, and select dialogue and gameplay options. This creates a wonderful communal vibe; in the performance this reviewer attended the group supported each player through challenging sections, spoke kindly to one another, and created a welcoming space for those present. This added to the show’s charm in a way I have never seen before.
Directors Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim have created a fantastic game that does these justice while also having its own unique flair. The gameplay is consistently engaging. Each of the game’s ten levels offers a new twist in the story or homage to games of old. There’s real delight in recognising references to Guitar Hero, Pong, Pokemon, platformers and side-scrollers, and even more delight in watching the audience discover these in real time. The audience also becomes attached to the donkey characters who face problems remarkably similar to our own, including exploitation, civil unrest, and dissatisfaction with current working standards. Also of note are the game’s three-dimensional environments, beautifully designed by Ariadne Sage.
That said, the production’s ambition also proves to be its main stumbling block. The length feels indulgent, stretching beyond the point where novelty and homage alone can sustain momentum. Audiences are warned that they decide the show’s runtime, as it depends on how quickly they want to progress through levels and how long they want their breaks to be. The show this writer attended lasted 8 hours. The consequence of this is both fatigue and schedule conflicts; only half of the audience could stay until the game’s end.
Part of that extreme length is due to how the game was played, but also because of the repetitious nature of particular challenges and a lack of clarity about what to do next. Those factors mean the elements which initially made the show fun – the extensive ‘ass’ puns, the joy of discovering a new video game reference, or glee at the absurdity of the storyline – can become tedious. This is unfortunate, given how fun the experience is at its start.
Still, asses.masses is an inventive work that expands the idea of what theatre can look like. Its willingness to be weird, game-brained and openly joyful is worth celebrating. Trimming and tightening its sections is highly necessary, but as it stands, it’s an absorbing communal experience – fascinating and undeniably fun.
