Mr Burns, a post-electric play

Production photos by Brett Boardman.

Joining together as a group to remember the knotty plotting and deadpan humour of a classic episode of The Simpsons is a great pastime. In the clever, meta-textural and intriguingly structured Mr Burns, a post-electric play, that pastime becomes key for survival in a world blighted by disaster.

It's an unusual concept, and by the time the cast are donning ridiculous but eerily uncanny cartoon eyeballs to imitate their four-fingered idols, you may ask yourself "Who comes up with this shit?" It's that uncanniness that makes Mr Burns compelling though. When the play opens, you could believe that the five people sitting around a crackling fire are just camping. That is, until a sound somewhere nearby prompts them to draw their weapons.

A terrifying nuclear disaster has reduced the United States to rubble, and its citizens live in chaos, separated from loved ones and trying to make their way in a deadened world returned to the stone age. They find comfort in nutting out the plot of the 1993 episode of The Simpsons "Cape Feare," and as the second and third acts take us further into the future and further into a world trying to set itself right, that opening conversation takes on strange significance.

Mr Burns is a play about escapism, and how art (no matter how seemingly inconsequential) can give meaning to our lives in dark times. By the third act, a fully-sung operatic extravaganza that combines the nagging melodies of famous pop songs with original lyrics, art and real life have merged to the point where it's impossible for the audience to extricate them from one another. Cartoonish meets callous is a decidedly brutal yet life-affirming way.

In less than two hours, Mr Burns spans around 25 years of narrative. From act-to-act, events feel too compressed to fully connect between the three distinct sections. Sometimes the play's obliqueness can be off-putting, and attention wavers.

Thankfully this production at Surry Hills' Belvoir St. Theatre is blessed by an enormously sympathetic and nuanced cast. Mitchell Butel is particularly impressive, moving from meek wanderer to flamboyant, sequinned, and frighteningly evil hunchback. The cast all find a real sweet spot, balancing the absurdity of the play's ambitions with the true emotion that it almost seems determined to mask.

Perhaps not the most satisfying theatre experience you're likely to have this year, but certainly one of the most unique, Mr Burns, a post-electric play is a fitfully absorbing, frustratingly uneven work that you'll never, ever forget. 

Mr Burns, a post-electric play is on at Belvoir St. Theatre, Surry Hills, until Sunday June 25th. See the Sydney Scoop calendar for performance times.