A crocodile, a rhinoceros, and a rooster. It’s the perfect set-up for a joke and also the names of the three “beasts” that make up Spinning Plate Co.’s Beast Trilogy: a triptych of larger-than-life plays staged over four years that have injected a much-needed dose of macabre absurdity into Melbourne’s independent theatre scene.

It’s easy to forget that when the company’s runaway hit The Crocodile premiered in 2023, most of our theatres were stuck in a post-pandemic malaise, peddling dour monodramas and escapist fantasies dressed up in faux-social realism. With an eye for maximalist design and grimly witty tragedies, the company’s creators, James Cerché and Jessica Stanley, found a sweet spot between our need for weird and joyous escapism and theatre that is critical of our equally weird and hellish lives under late-stage capitalism.

For The Crocodile, they turned fortyfivedownstairs into a dilapidated zoo, where we watched a man become a B-grade celebrity after being eaten by a freshwater croc. For their adaptation of Rhinoceros last year, they took us to a dead-end town to watch well-meaning journalists turn into ignorant, one-horned beasts. You can see why they’re award-winning: it takes an absurd premise to reveal the absurdity of everyday life.

For Olivia Dufault’s The Year of the Rooster, a very loose adaptation of The Odyssey, the team ties off their trilogy by transforming fortyfivedownstairs into a cockpit/wrestling ring for a WWE-style cockfighting competition based somewhere in Oklahoma. On paper, it’s the perfect premise to channel the company’s absurdist sensibilities: Rocky V in a chicken pen. But while the show’s performances and design are as impressive as ever, the production gets stuck in a tug-of-war of conflicting styles.

Year of the Rooster. Photo © Cameron Grant

We follow Odysseus Rex (Zachary Pidd): a red-headed rooster with an existential hatred of the sun and a steroid-fuelled violent streak. And Rex’s trainer, Gil Pepper (Stanley), a one-eyed McDonald’s employee stealing sauce packets for his ailing mother Lou (Natasha Herbert) and dreaming of a life he can be proud of. That’s where Dufault sticks her knife and twists it: in the egotistical heart of that particularly American myth of the underdog.

After Pepper is humiliated by his mother, his nineteen-year-old manager (AYA), and the town’s ringmaster (Cerché), the show’s first act ends with a slapstick cockfighting match that offers him a first – and only – taste of success.

From there, the toxic individualism that drives his American dream becomes a kind of bloodlust. He’ll stumble his way through morally bankrupt schemes and murderous outbursts to get what he wants. Underneath the show’s camp exaggerations and gallows humour, that’s our tragic takeaway: that the pathway to success is paved with moral bankruptcy and dehumanisation.

Year of the Rooster. Photo © Cameron Grant

It’s impossible to talk about Spinning Plates without mentioning the outlandish sets and costumes by the near-household name Dann Barber: Melbourne theatre’s go-to for Gothic maximalism with an absurdist edge. Barber’s world is a larger-than-life nightmare covered in a thin layer of grime — part-vaudevillian Tim Burton, part-John Waters at his most surreal and horrifying.

The Year of the Rooster is full of instant Barber classics: muscled-up leotards for our roosters, bedazzled groin guards and G-strings, piss-stained sheer sleepwear, and McDonald’s-branded bustiers. With help from costume-maker Christie Milton, Barber has created another otherworldly world. But sadly that’s also the problem.

In previous productions, Barber’s commitment to absurdism brought out the absurdity of conceptual scripts that prioritised allegory and symbolism over characterisation and worldbuilding. But Olivia Dufault’s script, while weird and wonderful, always has two feet in reality. Dufault is deeply interested in her characters, even as she subjects them to ever more ridiculous scenarios. Her style is that of the hyperrealist: she keeps realism close in order to underline how she’s testing its limits. Barber’s larger-than-life designs are simply too large. At worst, the show becomes a series of elaborate showcases for his incredible set pieces and costumes – a means to a punchline rather than a way to underline the script’s themes.

Year of the Rooster. Photo © Cameron Grant

There are moments when you can feel the show making a point with its unreal style – a way to reflect how dehumanising and unreal one’s personal dreams become within systems of labour. But for that reading to work you have to treat Dufault’s story as representative rather than a real (but ridiculous) story about real (but ridiculous) people.

It was telling that some of the best moments in the show were accidental. Herbert’s chair-ridden retiree, Lou, is the perfect Dolly Parton-esque debutante: a high-pitched Southern belle accent beneath a towering hairpiece. But it was Herbert struggling to leave the stage in her armchair-on-wheels that gave us a much-needed glimpse of something real to laugh at.

Pidd is similarly outstanding as the peacocking Odysseus, mining laughs with a darting glance or simple twist of the neck. But a highlight of their performance came when they broke character during a scene of courtship with AYA – a wheezing hen kidnapped from a McDonald’s chicken farm and dressed in a grotesque inflatable suit. Seeing the pair crack the veneer of Barber’s hyper-stylism for a second with fits of real laughter only underlined how detached from the story’s reality we’d been up until that point.

So while there isn’t a weak performance among the cast – from Cerché’s gold-toothed wrestling champion to AYA’s Disney-obsessed manager – none of these characters feel real enough to make you feel anything. As the childlike Gil Pepper, Stanley faces an uphill battle trying to land the show’s tragic end.

It’s a shame, both because of the company’s impressive past productions and the potential this production had to join their ranks. What we’re left with is a cautionary tale for any maximalist theatre-maker: more is more, until it’s too much.

Year of the Rooster plays at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne until 22 March.