Mummy’s Plastic’s Hot Cross Critters on Good Friday at The Rechabite was pure pundemic pundemonium, a panto on crack, a wild fever dream of chocoholics addicted to wordplay and delivered with a gyrating reverence by hyper-camp theatre kids. The whole show was a kind of controlled chaos, and the crowd, both young and old, lived for it.
The show started with an audio-visual display that was the highlight of the show and set the bar for the night. When the screens started rolling, it showed a mashup of adverts for various chocolate delights, subverting them to fit the narrative of a Garden of Eden. Clever and kitschy, I sat up straight and locked myself in for a wild ride.
Then there was the live band that churned out art rock (heavy on the rock) to support and highlight certain aspects of the narrative— an inverted version of comic relief, which is usually wedged into a production, to keep the audience engaged and to balance out the serious aspects. In this show, the band, dressed as little critters to ease any audience discombobulation in the medium code-switching, was the relief from the comedy. During the first song, the lead critter’s mic cable failed, but before the first song finished, the singer, with the skill of a true frontperson, had figured out how to handle the mic in a way to manage the issue with aplomb and the sound worked perfectly for the rest of the night.
The show writers clearly never met a pun they didn’t like; at two hours long, the show itself could have been cut down to an hour and a half of pure comedy gold, but as this was a one-night-only event, they just ran with it and milked it for all they could. And that’s just what the night was, fun-fun-fun of the silliest kind, a party that the audience was a willing part of. There was ample crowd involvement, with screen-prompted call-and-response panto lines and an Easter bonnet parade, replete with bitchy judging critique. And then there was the easter delivery, in which carrots were teasingly handed out (I ate mine) before they handed out the good shit… the chocolate.
Beneath the show itself was a nostalgia-laden look back at simpler days, with simpler chocolates. Still, it didn’t pull its punches with nods and winks to our colonial history, the destructive nature of the mining industry, and early racist policies of Australia— or as they referred to it, as the “white-choc Australia policy.” This nostalgia is a familiar attempt to return to a time that never really was, to look to the past to avoid the horrors of the present. Often, when artists go down this road, they erase the horrors of the past to placate the audience’s desire for a reprieve from things like the economic climate, Trump’s America or homophobia. The past is always easier to run to than the future— it is controlled and can be contorted into easy fodder for escapist postmodern irony. Thankfully, this production didn’t sugarcoat our history because at this time of year, everything is already too saccharine!
C.J. O’HARTE
Hot Cross Critters from Mummy’s Plastic TV World was presented on 18 Apr 2025 at The Rechabite. For more information about this past event, click here.
