Look again: Exhibit

Early in Exhibit, Emma J. Hawkins and Leisa Prowd climb inside boxes.

They are simple plywood structures, barely big enough to contain them. Which, of course, they don’t.

Hawkins prises hers open from the inside. Soon the boxes come apart, and the pair spend the next hour rearranging their pieces: into platforms, a lectern, a long thin stage, a boxing ring. Around them curtains appear, lights dim, woolly landscapes hang. At one point they stuff themselves inside enormous grey beanbags and dance as two lumbering blancmanges. At another they stalk a catwalk swathed in furs, fabulously rich and important, women who know exactly what they are worth.

Everything keeps changing except the fact that we are looking at them.

Exhibit, created and performed by Hawkins and Prowd with the incisive directorial eye of Susie Dee, is very funny about looking. Until it isn't.

Both performers know what it means to enter a room and have their bodies arrive first. To be noticed, categorised, made remarkable. To have an imagined repertoire waiting for them: the oddity, the elf, the joke. Hawkins and Prowd are actors, and so the cruelty has a professional precision. They don't want not to be seen. They want the leading role.

They want to be beautiful. They want to be sexy. They want to be worth “ten thousand dollars a day”.

Fuck the casting directors. Fuck the leading ladies. Fuck Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman and Toni Collette.

There is something exhilarating in the sheer bad manners of it. No graceful gratitude. No requirement to turn exclusion into wisdom. Hawkins and Prowd are allowed envy and vanity and rage. They get to want what they were told belonged to somebody else.

And they are very good at making us laugh.

The theatrical machinery is constantly mutating around them. Dan West's sound and Richard Vabre's lighting transform the Courthouse as quickly as Hawkins and Prowd rebuild it. With movement consultant Kyall Shanks, they make exuberant use of their bodies and the space. A boxing ring becomes an audition. Furniture becomes costume. Bodies become exhibits, glamour girls, dancers.

Look at us. No, not like that.

The distinction is crushing.

Because a lifetime of being looked at does something more insidious than make a person self-conscious. Other people's eyes can become your own. The gaze follows you into the mirror. You learn to recognise the version of yourself everybody else has already decided to see.

And still Exhibit keeps offering spectacle.

Hawkins and Prowd crawl and strut and dance. They make themselves gorgeous. Ridiculous. Their bodies are endlessly inventive. I caught myself being surprised by what they could do with them, and then caught myself being surprised.

There I was, looking.

Late in the work, a dance begins to repeat. Again. Again. Faster. Again. The performers push harder. What was funny becomes effort; what was spectacle becomes labour. The pleasure of watching begins to sour.

I found myself thinking: See what I will do to make you see me. The thought embarrassed me.

Of course, Hawkins and Prowd have been making themselves visible all night. That is the contract of theatre. They perform and we watch. But Exhibit picks at that contract like a scab until the apparently passive act of looking begins to feel anything but passive.

It would be easier if the work simply asked us not to stare. It doesn't.

Look at me. Desire me. Take me seriously. Let me be ordinary. Let me be extraordinary. See my body.

For fuck's sake, see me.

By its final moments, the riotous transformations have fallen away. What remains is unexpectedly tender, and I found a lump rising in my throat.

Exhibit plays at La Mama Courthouse until 4 October as part of Melbourne Fringe Festival.

Disclosure: A complimentary ticket to Exhibit was provided to Melbourne Stage Review for the purpose of review. Melbourne Stage Review retains full editorial independence.