Performer/creator/designer/director: Nigel Kellaway
Composer/percussionist: David Montgomery (after J.S.Bach)
Restaurateur: Gay Bilson
Video artist: Peter Oldham
Lighting Design: Simon Wise
Costumes: Nigel Kellaway

Premiered: 17th November 1994 at Performance Space, Sydney
Directed and performed solo performance/installation, a 10 day/240 hour performance marathon. 

(1995) Excerpts performed at the Hong Kong Fringe.  Remounted for SIDETRACK PERFORMANCE GROUP’S Contemporary Performance Week 6.

(1996) Remounted for Progressive Dinner Conference, The Performance Space, Sydney.  Tour to the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, W.A. (co-produced by Lesbian and Gay Pride).

(1998) Toured to Adelaide Festival with pianist Gerard Willems and Gay Bilson.

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This Most Wicked Body is the product of a ten day marathon that took place in Sydney in 1994. Nigel Kellaway was locked into a theatre space for 240 hours. Each hour had been carefully preconceived, leaving some opportunity for improvisation and development over the ten days. The discoveries of that 240 hours on stage have been distilled into 90 minutes of intense theatre – brutal, pornographic and ‘wickedly’ funny.

This Most Wicked Body (re)invents Nigel Kellaway’s forti(something)eth birthday – a ludicrous moment of crisis. The man reinvents himself. He demands some response from the failing body he has created. He juggles a theatrical fiction with the reality of himself onstage before an audience. He invites a spectator to join him for his celebratory dinner – someone to act out his object of desire; to share in his dark, comical self-doubt. Joining them on stage is the acclaimed concert pianist Gerard Willems performing a phenomenal all Beethoven program – the monster sonatas.

This Most Wicked Body is about living with the fiction of Nigel Kellaway – an icon of elegance and obscenity. It casts honesty into the spotlight, interrogating the authenticity of the virtuoso performance.
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The dinner-suited upper body of a man hovers in the distance above a grand piano. Glimpsed through a fine curtain he looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy, though an unusually elegant one, in white-face, awkwardly held, voice masked in stilted refinement. This man would have something to say about being wounded and discarded. For every apparent truth demolished, for every lie revised, the real constantly asserts itself, even when the plug is pulled. This man is playing himself, however much he quarrels with Identity (his own, the whole idea of It).
Real-er than the rest is concert pianist Gerard Willems, sublime master of Beethoven sonatas. He offers no mere accompaniment, giving us complete works with astonishing focus and beauty. As soon as it happens, you recognise the inevitability of the penultimate scene, the Willems-Kellaway (Schubert F minor Fantasie) piano duet (the latter initially on his way offstage for a piss): a coalescence of beauties, with Kellaway now focussed on the partnership, emptied of cynicism and rage, a moment of refuge before the work’s final burst of bewilderment and pain and its dying fall. Concert and performance merge as almost equal partners, an astonishing synthesis of performing realities. Although never said, “This Most Wicked Body”, is therefore also about music.

Keith Gallasch, RealTime @ The Telstra Adelaide Festival, March 1998
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