Who's the Best?

Whilst not exactly what Ridout meant, there is something particularly wrong with theatre at the moment: it’s happening online rather than in person. Brought to you by University of Wollongong, Who’s the Best? leans into the absurdity and futility of this failure in order to seek out and revel in the theatricality of the wrongness. In so doing, the cast seek to rise about the failings of the situation and look to success, chiefly: which one of these third year graduating students is the best? It’s the question they and their audiences have been asking themselves and each other for the past three years, and in this show they get to the bottom of it, once and for all.

Performance scholar Nicholas Ridout suggests that when it comes to theatre, the art form is constituted by an ongoing process of failure: That there is something wrong with theatre is a sign that it is theatre (Ridout 2006, p. 33).

We can’t be in space together, but we can be in time together; bearing witness to the sort of absurd exercise in silliness that capitalism necessitates.

Watch this theatre performance inspired by the vanguard of the seriously silly and sillily serious in Australian theatre, directed by Malcolm Whittaker, and written by Malcolm Whittaker and Ellen Houghton, in collaboration with the cast of third-year Bachelor of Performance students – on Saturday, 6 November 2021 at 7:00 PM AEDT.