SYDNEY FRINGE: THE HIDEOUS DEMISE OF DETECTIVE SLATE
It’s pulp, pure and simple. Placed on a stage, juiced with ‘cream yourself funky music’ and finished with a knowing wink of 21st century irony. Writer Alli Sebastian Wolf takes us through her hardboiled radio drama and the trials and tribulations of an ill-fated Jericho Slate …
So, without giving too much away, what happens in The Hideous Demise of Detective Slate?
When Doctor Blacks winds up corpsed in his laboratory on lighting hill, Miss Scarlett looks set to take the fall. She calls on lone wolf detective Jericho Slate to clear her name, but the only thing hotter than those legs is the secret she’s hiding. The rest is a rollercoaster ride through mobsters, corrupt cops, Oedipal flashbacks and sexy sirens, where archetypes are turned on their heads and used for yoyos. Could this all lead to the detective’s hideous demise? You’ll have to come see…
What interests you in the format of radio dramas?
It’s so honest – you can see the same actors putting on different voices, the coconut’s not a horse, all the beautiful mechanics are laid out before you, you’re let in on the secret. And somehow that lets everything become so much more alive in the your head, it’s like magic – you’re in the mad scientist laboratory with the diabolical inventions, or down in the fog by the docks or shivering in the mortuary, then looking for your teeth in the gutter alongside our detective – because it’s more real than real. The audience gets to make it too. The Hideous Demise of Detective Slate is as a live production, masquerading as a radio play which means you get the best of both worlds. With a brilliant live band and a stage set up halfway between a 1930s recording studio and a noir play, this is made to be a watched radio play – an exciting new form of theatre. It’s fast and sexy and so fun.
What research did you do into the 1940s time of high crime and fast-talking molls?
Noir crime fiction is my passion, and for this play I dug myself into it till all I could see was in B&W and everything tasted like old pulp fiction magazines.
Is it a coincidence that this hardboiled detective piece is taking place in the Boiler Room …?
No – it is no coincidence, you see detective style crime fiction was nicknamed ‘hard boiled’ in the early 1940s when the most renowned writer of the genre, Raymond Chandler, was bludgeoned to death by two bit newspaper critic Derrick O’Riely. The weapon used was a sack full of hardboiled eggs – O’Riely’s comment on Chandlers writing being pasty, pointless and full of cholesterol. The assessment was flawed but the name caught on, and when the body of a cleaner was found in a little room underneath the factory theatre in Marrickville – with bruising and egg shells to show he suffered a similar fate – well, they just had to make it a theatre in Chandler’s honour. And we just had to have it. Ghosts are great for the acoustics, after all.
What are your thoughts on this year’s inaugural Sydney Fringe Festival? How important is it to you as an (inner-west?) creative?
Brilliant. Love it.
Sept 14-25 (5 performances only), The Boiler Room, Factory Theatre, 105 Victoria Rd, Marrickville, $16-20, thesydneyfringe.com.au
