Review: Jeremy and Lucas buy a Fucking House

<p>It takes a while to digest everything you see here, especially if the mention of dicks takes a shot at your appetite. Oh and this show is sprinkled with mentions of anything dicks, metaphoric dicks, avocado dicks, dicks that have been in the elderly and what animals do with theirs. Before the show even started, a lucky audience member won a fitting raffle prize—a bag of dicks.</p>

Culture

It takes a while to digest everything you see here, especially if the mention of dicks takes a shot at your appetite. Oh and this show is sprinkled with mentions of anything dicks, metaphoric dicks, avocado dicks, dicks that have been in the elderly and what animals do with theirs. Before the show even started, a lucky audience member won a fitting raffle prize—a bag of dicks.

This did come off as rather fatuous and seemed as if it could appeal to the inner ten year olds in all of us but as the show progressed, it became clear that behind the façade of dick jokes, there hid a cleverly written play by Natesha Somasundaram (who also directed and performed—is there anything she can’t do?).

First of all, this show flips the narrative on its head of two Aussie blokes trying to make something of themselves in a property the size of a small patch of someone’s backyard by having a queer Sri Lankan woman play the titular character. Natesha plays Jeremy, the unemployed knucklehead who constantly finds himself in trouble and is able to afford doing whatever he wants because his parents are well-off. Lucas, on the other hand (played by Edan Goodall) is hard-working and constantly on the move to make his American father (played by a cardboard cut-out of John Wayne) proud of him while navigating his own ambitions of being a reputed journalist.

Lucas’s struggle to manage both his and his parents’ ambitions captures the struggle Natesha faced during much of her young adulthood with her Sri Lankan immigrant parents. Natesha’s fear of the future and nihilism is seen in both characters and is something we can all relate to—what is the Australian dream? Is it having a property of your own? When is it enough? Have you made it then? Does it even matter?

Perhaps the absurdity of the meaninglessness of life is best played out with dicks.

 

Jeremy and Lucas buy a Fucking House is on at La Mama until April 15.

 
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