REVIEW: Brothers Bare at Melbourne Fringe Festival
- Jacqui Dwyer
- Oct 8
- 2 min read
What would a Grimm’s Brothers tale look like if set in St Kilda? Grungy and raw, Brothers Bare (Ranting Mime Productions) is just in time for the spooky season and fits perfectly up the steep staircase and into the urban void that is The Explosives Factory.
Written by Jessica Fallico and Iley Jones this tale is divided into three vignettes which invite the audience to consider how we navigate an ever-corrupting world and strive towards the perfect values that childhood fairytales attempted to instil in us. That was before we were exposed to poison apples, digital trolls and premeditated bear attacks. Our gentle Puck for the evening, a nameless narrator played by Elisheva Biernoff-Giles, poetically introduced us to each new scene with a haunted light in her eyes, refreshingly coarse language and moments of vulnerable earnest. Hope for our happy ending had all but faded, but her final call to action deftly threw the torch to us.
The intricate wordplay in this script is a bookworm’s dream, chock full of classic Grimm’s references that take on fresh meaning with a current lens. This was especially showcased in a rapid conceptual exchange between a familiar white rabbit and a despondent damsel, sparred by Charlie Veitch and Grace Gemmell. Charlie’s delicious vocal delivery and targeted eye contact invite the audience to question if ‘stuck’ is something a person can ever really be. His versatility – and that of all on stage – is well worked throughout this triptych as he transitions from stuck-up rodent to trickster troll to an all too real villain. Dion Zapantis commands the space in the final scene with charm and power, which hits real and hard in a way that shifts our contemplations from distant fairytale ‘what if’ to extremely immediate, with very gripping intimacy coordinated by Annabelle Tudor.
This piece is not only wordy but extremely physical, and Grace Gemmell’s exploration of body image in the centre of this piece is expertly grotesque. Props to the sound design by Raphael Bradbury for making me squirm. The choreography by Cameron Boxall is punchy and dynamic, and viscerally affecting to watch.
Brothers Bare is darkly humorous in a too-close-to-home way, and leaves you somewhere between a creepy campfire story and one of those ‘my life is changed’ long form D&M’s about social media and feminism. It begs us to go beyond the D&M and start making change with connection and action, perfectly positioned within the 2025 Melbourne Fringe Festival’s theme Action Heroes. Perhaps, we’re not as ‘stuck’ as we may think.
