Bright and Bold: Memoirs of a Desk Goblin
The Blue Room Theatre
Wednesday, February 8 2023
Returning to The Blue Room Theatre as part of this year’s Summer Nights programme, is Dureshawar Khan, the Desk Goblin themselves, with new piece Bright and Bold, covering their time at the front desk of a tattoo parlour, but also so very, very much more.
Being both the barrier and the conduit between the artists and their public. Being a counsellor when a client is half an hour away and their design has been lost. Telling walk ins, expecting a full sleeve that day, without a deposit, where exactly to go.
Being called Ray, because the Australian accent destroying their given names isn’t covered by the public liability, metaphorically blowing up the beautiful, significant, and sacred.
Bailing up parents approving their children getting work done. All done with a voice mixed somewhere between Gollum and leprechaun. The power, we likes it, precious.
The Goblin flashes back to childhood, as an eight-year-old, dragged to Islamabad’s open-air bazaar by their mother. A stall at the end of the impromptu cricket pitch, a wizened old man, his parrot, and a literal car battery, gaffer taped to the ghost of a Walkman, their first vision of actual tattoo equipment. If the client was very lucky, there might even be fresh supplies.
Flash forward a decade, now in Perth. For Dureshawar’s very first tattoo of their very own, a sternum piece, all but guaranteed to impress the bouncers at Amps.
A quick game show, and then a history lesson. Respecting the elders. Loving the elders.
From the female trailblazers in Australia, across the Pacific to America, with the realisation better hygiene could wipe out blood poisoning, along with symbolism, certain tattoos allowing queer self-identification. Groucho Marx singing his love of the artform with Lydia. The Picts, Polynesians, and Pashtuns, all the way back to the Neolithic tribes of the last Ice Age.
A mummified body found in the Tyrolean Alps, seventy-one tattoos, six thousand years old. And a better looker than three quarters of Tinder. Just needing a fish selfie.
Skilfully weaving the bazaars of modern Pakistan, the 1960s backroads of Australia’s carnival circuit, and the millennia long history of tattooing in multiple cultures, is a feat. One that Dureshawar executes with aplomb. A born storyteller, they bring powerful pieces to the stage time and again.