Look at the State of the Carpet - Old Fitz

LOOK AT THE STATE OF THE CARPET – Old Fitz Theatre

Created by Stephanie Hart and Lenny Ann Low

Peeling back the onion on life with grit, wonder and perhaps a cup of tea, Look At The State Of The Carpet, we are told in the blurb, is a searing four-act play from the minds of two self-proclaimed idiots.

Stephanie Hart and Lenny Ann Low return with a brand-new work about friendship, artistic difference and the strange contortions required to sustain both - including pushing their chins deep into their necks.

Formed from more than thirty years of friendship and an unexpectedly deep reservoir of camaraderie, the work is both challenging and charming.

Founding members of Throttle and long-time collaborators with Frumpus, Hart and Low bring decades of devised performance experience, having previously appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Adelaide Fringe, Performance Space, Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art. What emerges here is a living archive of a friendship forged through decades of experimental performance.

The show leans into absurd clowning: dark, strange and consistently funny. Costumed like 19th-century troubadours in hitched calico skirts, waistcoats and top hats adorned with plumes and frilled collars, the pair also operate their own onstage tech - a decision that proves to be a constant source of hilarity and mild alarm (you really do have to be there). They take their time. They look us in the eye. Something is happening, though we’re not always sure exactly what.

Watching them work, you sense the unspoken rhythms of long collaboration - the tiny shifts of breath and glance that keep a piece like this alive.

Audience participation adds further unpredictability. On the night I attended, “Senior Bob” took a fall and blood was spilled - yet the show continued on its determinedly crooked trajectory, an example of the particular elasticity of live performance that Hart and Low understand so well.

The performance unfolds through a series of memorable images: Lenny Ann Low hidden by, then emerging from beneath, a towel that briefly becomes a medieval mantle; a bird held carefully on a branch; Hart coughing up a dead bird; a pile of clothes accumulating like the sediment of shared years - and, of course, the much-referenced carpet itself, which does indeed eventually appear.

There is something quietly radical in watching senior artists embrace nonsense with such commitment. In an era when so much theatre strives for polish and narrative clarity, Hart and Low remind us that the anarchic spirit of devised performance - messy, unpredictable and gloriously human - still has teeth. It also feels like a reminder of a lineage in Sydney performance: mischievous, handmade theatre that once thrived in small rooms and stubbornly refuses to disappear.

Beneath the absurdity lies a quietly moving portrait of what it means to keep making work — and keep making each other laugh — over a lifetime.

Cryptic, chaotic and frequently thigh-slappingly funny.

Recommended.

Review by Kate Gaul

(I attended a preview performance.)