Review – Outback Homosexual Serial Killer
Dion Teasdale‘s Outback Homosexual Serial Killer attempts to take audiences on the journey of bank teller Devon Baxter’s descent into internalised madness, documenting his metamorphosis from a neurotic city dweller to an eccentric madman with sexually violent and homicidal tendencies, all set against the backdrop of outback Australia. This hour-long one man show includes send ups to iconic Australian films like Wolf Creek and Priscilla: Queen of the Desert, vintage projection slides, film and photographs taken from along the Sturt Highway and more. Audiences are confronted with the concepts of mental illness, the blurring of fantasy and reality, and a range of extreme emotion.
Unfortunately it’s all just too much to fit into one show. One minute Baxter is at desk receiving strange packages from an unknown woman, then he’s behind the wheel of, what we find out later, is a mysteriously-acquired ute inexplicably being driven through the outback. He attempts to draw comparisons between his emotional state and the outback landscape, but they just seem to fall short of the poignancy that he is clearly trying to express. Suddenly he’s dressed in leather gloves and aviator sunglasses in a homicidal rage, and just as you get a chance to work out whether or not he actually killed anyone, he’s dressed in a cheap wig and lipstick emulating Hugo Weaving. Despite the clear effort taken to create a sense psychological decay and a blur between reality and the depths of the characters imagination, it really just feels a bit messy.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Outback Homosexual Serial Killer was created from a place of genuine artistic vision. What Teasdale was trying to convey is unmistakably clear from beginning to end, but it just doesn’t really come across. Baxter’s cross-dressing tendencies and anxiety disorder seem to suggest that these are symptoms of madness, which could potentially be offensive to some audience members. I genuinely remained optimistic throughout the show that it would all come together, perhaps with a big twist that tied up all the loose ends. But as the screen went blank, and one audience member boldly took the chance of beginning to applaud, I felt that that moment just never came.
