Review – The Dark Garden

Paul McDermott created The Dark Garden, a collection of paintings and songs, several years ago while he was grieving the death of a friend. The paintings were displayed in an exhibition for the Adelaide Fringe; this is its complimentary work, a stage show for Paul to perform songs and tell anecdotes on the nature of grief and melancholy. It sounds bleak, but Paul promises “light moments over the fucking horror.”

The songs, lyrically, are quite stark, exploring one or two thoughts through the turn of a phrase. “If I were you and you were me; let me take your place” – it could be Paul telling us he wants to escape his grief, or offering his life for that of his dead friend, and it’s a neat and simple ambiguity. Taken alone, these songs are quite small, and it’s only together that they tell a larger story. But the band worked well to flesh them out individually – these are all rock songs, but some show a country influence, while others come across more as a hymn. All told, it comes together neatly enough, but it’s through anecdotes that Paul really engages with the audience.

Paul McDermott is a natural performer, and performers, he tells us, are pathological liars. So it’s with a grain of salt that you accept him on his word when tells us that this time he wants to be honest. Moments later, he is telling us a tale of the Great Lamaro, whose goose could honk out the solutions to arithmetic sums and predict the future. Of course, the goose had no special talent, but was simply reacting to the thumb jabs of its handler. It’s a story not unlike that of Clever Hans, the sum-solving horse, who could apparently perform various intellectual feats, until it was turned out that he was only watching for the reactions of his human observers. We get the performance we expect, which is why a goose nestling a thumb in its rectum can predict the future to the satisfaction of an audience.

Paul himself suggested that he was perhaps such a goose, and encouraged the audience to guess who was the thumb, leaving open the interpretation that maybe there isn’t much substance beyond his performance; that there are no heavy shadows looming within The Dark Garden. And rightfully so: as a performer, he may not owe an audience anything more personal than a polished performance. He certainly seems more comfortable alone on stage under a spotlight than he would be anywhere else.

A bizarre heckling incident shed light on how much of the real Paul McDermott we saw that night. After putting the disruption to bed, by eviscerating the disrupters, one of them stormed off in a tirade of her own. Paul was visibly stirred by the situation, and wondered if he had taken things too far by “letting the other Paul out”. This led into the saddest song of the evening, in which Paul was visibly overcome, choked and teary through the performance. But just as we were collectively stunned into silence at the end of this, the most moving moment of the whole show, he bowed his head and flickered his fingers, signalling that the song was over and it was time for us all to clap.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6t_c-qbCSa4#at=40&w=40]