Creon Upton reviews Da Da Honk Honk The The Dry Cleaning of Père Ubu, presented by Free Theatre, directed by Peter Falkenberg, at The Pump House, Thursday 8 October 2026.
One of my most memorable gigs of the past decade was Delaney Davidson playing at St Stephen’s Church in Onewhero in 2017. Tickets were available by email from a helpful person named Di, from the Onewhero Society of Performing Arts (OSPA). I made a bank transfer to secure the tickets ($25 each) and was told that my name would be on the door. It was.
(Looking up OSPA’s Facebook promotion now, nine years later, I find that my other option for securing a ticket was to: “visit Liz Alexander at the Pancakes are Delicious caravan outside Tuakau Sea Scouts Mon-Fri 6.30am until 12.30pm.”)
Onewhero is a small Waikato town not too far south of Auckland. Taking my place on a pew, just in time for the show, I got the impression that most of the audience were regulars of OSPA events, probably on the mailing list, familiar with the unpredictable variety of stage shows that might find their way to that welcoming spot, and happy to have them. After all, a night out’s as good as a day off at the beach.
Delaney pulls off that trick of sort of looking like some old-time folksy crooner when he’s really a wild-man punk in an undertaker’s suit and op-shop shoes. He certainly wasn’t taking any prisoners that night. Alongside his carnival, freakshow films, he played a set of cascading waves of concentrated noise. It felt like a kind of a blend of expressionist surf-punk blues, and wailing, crazed, sentimental laments, loud enough to blow the roof off of the place, and — and this is the cool part — taking the audience so much by surprise that we barely had time to register how much we were enjoying it — because of, and also perhaps despite, the unvanquishable strains of anarchic energy engulfing us. And then it was over, and we all emerged blinking into the late summertime evening, cobwebs well and truly blown.
Delaney has of course worked with Free Theatre before, so there is a connection here. I can’t be accused of entire irrelevancy.
In fact, I believe Delaney joined Free Theatre in its performance of The Black Rider just a few months before I saw him in Onewhero.
The Black Rider is one of three major collaborations between Tom Waits and Robert Wilson — the others are Woyzeck and Alice — and the Free Theatre has performed them all in recent years.
Despite that, weirdly, last night — at Da Da Honk Honk The The Dry Cleaning of Père Ubu — one of my first impressions was something like: “This feels like what one of those Tom Waits/Robert Wilson collaborations must have been like.” I mean, I felt that more strongly last night than seeing a Free Theatre production of an actual Waits/Wilson collaboration. It’s hard to explain this, but it was like there was more of the essence of the tradition in this unique piece than in the reproductions of the actual works themselves.
What tradition? Well, the thing about a tradition is you don’t have to be a scholar (thankfully) to know it when you see it. That’s why it’s a tradition. I’m talking about a tradition of the non-conformist in theatre and music — the punk energy of dada and the avant-garde; confrontational displays of the physical and the psychological; the protean, the absurd, the cruel, the unrelenting, the surreal, the childish, the childlike, the agonised and hysterical. The rejection and inversion of narratives that embody and reproduce ideologies of power, authority, righteousness and convention. The grotesquely comedic. An artistic slant that recoils from easing the audience into a lukewarm sea of complacency.
Now, that all sounds very, very precious, doesn’t it?
It really does.
But, happily, that tradition is a tradition, and a tradition is by definition also a lukewarm sea of complacency, and that is actually alright.
So, I didn’t notice anyone in the audience at Da Da Honk Honk scandalised, confronted, confused and angry. Their worldview was not being rent asunder. Like me, mostly they seemed to be having a great time. The music was cool — even the kazoo — and the performances were witty and just a little bit wild. I mean, who doesn’t want to see a bit of hoovering on the stage of a night out?
What it was all about — well, everyone will have their own ideas. There were nods to some of the important icons of the tradition — a horse’s head, a cruel looking puppet, real-life marionettes — and it seemed to me some notes on gender roles bled through. Do you also, dear reader, find cleaning demeaning?
When one of the musician/birds came close to me, I noticed scribbled on the unfeathered sides of his wings, “left wing” and “right wing”. I don’t take from that that a particular political commentary was intended, but I could, and I’d stand behind it.
The musical choices echoed the tradition as well — like Delaney, actually, that sort of jazzy/blues sensibility that leans more into the beats, drones, grinds and thumps of massed and urgent bodies than it does into engineered, bite-sized pop pieces made for sanitised and discrete consumption.
Da Da Honk Honk is a sort of cabaret show with echoes of the rock opera and a total resistance to narrative. It has birds and pelican dreams. It quotes the wonderful Florence Shaw: “Fuck the world (dada dada).”
And we don’t need to know what it means to know what it means.
Da Da Honk Honk The The Dry Cleaning of Père Ubu runs until Saturday 10 October.
