Karate Man
The Sydney Fringe Festival always brings out the most creative, subversive, and original independent works of the year in Sydney. The platform that this festival gives fresh theatrical talent cannot go understated, and it’s always so refreshing to see the kind of angles that creatives go for with their work.
That’s why I went into Karate Man completely blind, and came out a shocked and changed person. What an utterly, utterly hilarious and original 50 minutes I had just spent.
Karate Man: A Live Action Video Game doesn’t just borrow the aesthetics of video games, or the themes often seen in them, but it well and truly lives up to its title as a theatrical production where the audience can manipulate the protagonist via a video game controller. Like, there’s really no metaphor here. The audience passes around a controller and you move left and right, creating audio that signals the immensely talented Bruno Dubosarsky to follow suit.
Over the course of the story, bluetooth controller in tow, audience members determine the course of the story as Karate Man, his nemesis Ross Roundkick - now dead, comes to terms with living a karate free life. From making Karate Man pick between mundane chores to what jobs to apply for in a series of increasingly hilarious and contrived video-game-esque plot devices, the show that you see will very likely wind up differently to the one I did.
The actors on stage are all sublimely gifted with improv, and this plus the very deliberate “low budget 80’s video game” style means that any hiccups or stage mishaps are played up for laughs really well. Occasionally, a controller malfunction of misread line wouldn’t be capitalised on, and the show seemed to slow down for a moment and temporarily lose the audience from the trance we had been instilled in, but this was only a temporary break from an otherwise consistently hilarious show.
This is one of the highlights of Fringe, a subversive and incredibly novel piece of interactive theatre, worth a solid 4.5 stars.
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Karate Man runs until the 21st of September
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