Theatre is an emotional artform, and Site UnSeen left me incandescent with rage. My withering review for The Age appears below. It gets stabby, but this is rhetoric, people: I do retain enough executive brain function not to go around killing actors in a homicidal frenzy, however strong the impulse this wrong-headed disgrace inspired in me.

Why did I have such a vehement response to this piece? In short, it exploits the homeless. The overarching frame of Site UnSeen is conceived as something akin to Homelessness! The Magical Mystery Tour! Far from being ‘immersive theatre’, it’s a voyeuristic sideshow, where the real stories of the homeless have been subsumed into a narrative that alternately pities and lampoons them.

Fake bag ladies! Counterfeit food vouchers! Pretend soup kitchens! A half-baked role-play where the audience must grab tinned food, newspapers, old mattresses and cardboard boxes, and construct an improvised shelter for the night! How on earth could the artists fail to see that this farcical simulation has the potential to mock the lived experience of such a marginalised group?

It’s worth comparing Site UnSeen to Back to Back’s rigorous Ganesh vs The Third Reich. Both deal with difficult subject matter, where the power relations between the tellers of stories and those who ‘own’ the stories are deeply problematic. Ganesh overtly dramatises its own failures. Among other things, it struggles with the unpleasant truth that some of the intellectually disabled actors in its ensemble do not fully comprehend the play they’re acting in. Its flensing honesty and unflinching intelligence are absolutely crucial in holding the show suspended above an abyss of exploitation.

Now look at Site UnSeen. It isn’t quite as bad as staging an immersive theatrical re-enactment of Auschwitz (with a few Jews in the cast to lend it credibility) but it is in the same ballpark. I’m not saying that the idea in Site UnSeen could never work. But if, as artists, you’re going to hold yourselves out as a theatrical tour of homeless St. Kilda, you must show us that you have grappled with your own privilege, fought over your tenuous right to tell these stories, and acknowledged the onerous responsibility that comes with doing so. Anything less will lack authenticity, and be an insult to the powerless people whose stories have been appropriated.

***

Site UnSeen, By Robyn Szechtman and Graham Pitts, Departs from the Palais carpark, Until Oct 22. 

Site Unseen is a shameful travesty. If you care about performance or the plight of the homeless, you’ll find it insulting beyond belief. The show aims for “the presentation of homelessnesss by and with the homeless”. What it actually does is appalling. This is the Sovereign Hill of homeless St. Kilda. It has fake bag ladies in it. And pretend soup-kitchens. Incredibly, these are two of the less offensive examples of what’s on offer.

An odious framing device opens proceedings. From a sideshow tent in the Palais carpark, we’re introduced to a theatre group operating a community walking tour. It’s headed by the privileged, pretentious and morally vain Felicity, who is virtually wetting herself with compassion for the ‘disad-VANT-aged’. Felicity can’t be for real, you think, and she isn’t. That doesn’t stop you wanting to stab her.

When the curtains are pulled back and we’re dragged into a pathetic ‘magic show’, you want to stab everyone involved. The bad-accent circus – French magician, Romanian psychic, an actor in an elephant costume – show us that misfortune can strike anyone, anywhere, that the fate of the homeless could be ours one day.

It sets up a repeated motif, where the blindingly obvious keeps getting sucked into the vacuum where the actors’ self-respect used to be. I felt so embarrassed for them, especially Chris Bunworth, a fine performer whose leathery homeless guide would have been a highlight, had egregiously shallow thinking not doomed the show from the outset.

At Theatreworks, we reached a nadir. Corralled onto a grungy set, the audience was let loose on bric-a-brac, and told to create improvised shelter for the night. Just like real homeless people! After setting ourselves up, we were treated to a glossy video montage of nocturnal St. Kilda, as actors wove in and out, playing outraged residents, social workers, officers from the council, prostitutes and drug addicts.

Then Felicity came back in and we all went skipping happily out into the sunshine, our lives enriched by a new and profound understanding of our city’s poorest, most vulnerable members, and the challenges they face. Yeah, right.

Promenade theatre can excel at immersing the audience in marginalised stories – Ilbijerri’s The Dirty Mile is a prime example – and theatre performed by homeless people can be enriching, as The Tempest, made with the St. Kilda Drop-In Centre, proved at Theatreworks earlier this year.

But whatever authenticity might mean in this context, it has to be more a mere acknowledgement that you’re unable to faithfully represent the lives of those forced by poverty to live on the streets. The homeless need food and shelter and respect. They do not need the humiliation of bad art. If I were Festival director, I’d close the show down.