TIGER SHORT A FEW STRIPES 
PAMELA PAYNE 
14/02/1992 
Sydney Morning Herald 
  
DAVID WENHAM tackles the most uncompromising form of theatre: the uncostumed player on a bare, or almost bare, stage. 

There's a metal ladder on the stage, and a few orange cubes. There are stage lights, but neither sound effects nor music. 

So there he stands: an actor and a text. He tells us a story. And what a story it is: Dario Fo's vigorous political fable 
of a soldier, a tiger and her cub; of Mao's army, Chiang Kai-shek and the Cultural Revolution; of Tiananmen Square and its 
bloody demonstrations. 

Wenham tells his story simply, as if to a group of children. He tells it as the soldier who's wounded in battle and who 
shelters in the cave of the tiger and her cub. 

And, as his story unfolds, he illustrates it with rough-drawn representations of the characters - animal and human - that 
the soldier encounters. 

He shows us, for example, the implacable tiger roaring her commands; her spoilt-brat cub throwing a tantrum at the back of 
the cave; the slow-thinking villagers sceptical of the soldier's tale; the strutting, peremptory party cadre. He moves about
the stage, uses his ladder as a scenic prop - a hill, for example - or just a convenient perch. 

Wenham establishes an easy, reassuring relationship with his audience. And he achieves what he seems to want. He's the 
enthusiastic teller of a story that contains enough suspense and enough comedy to sustain interest. 

And who doesn't like to be told a rattling good story? 

Wenham entertains us with Fo's plot. But he defuses Fo's politics. Certainly he introduces the piece with information about 
its Chinese origins and the allegorical significance of the tiger and he puts it in its specific political context - Fo 
rewrote his 1970s version of the play after Tiananmen Square. 

But, that done, he seems content to do no more than involve his audience in the narrative of the soldier's survival. 

It's not a matter of expecting Wenham to reproduce - or even attempt to approximate - Fo's performance style: his 
knife-sharp, robust physicality, his explosive energy, irreverence, vulgarity, comic virtuosity. 

Nevertheless, Wenham never manages to find a style of his own that reveals either the ferocity and danger in this play, 
or its splendid, dynamic theatricality. And, although at times he is very funny, he never pushes Fo's comedy even close to 
its limits. 

So what Wenham, and director Anni Finsterer, do, in the end, is take Fo's text and use it for their own purposes: simple 
story-telling. 

It's as if they've taken an intriguingly woven fabric, unravelled just one of its threads, and laid that out in front of 
us. We may well regret the loss of the rest of the cloth. 

Happily, though, this thread that they have chosen is itself compelling; and Wenham presents it with disarming gusto.