Well, it wasn’t the usual demure Melbourne Festival crowd that piled into the Merlyn Theatre for the opening of Life and Opinions of Two Dogs (★★★1/2): the local expat Chinese community was out in force, and the place was buzzing.

Two Dogs follows the adventures of a couple of country mutts – played by Liu Xiaoye and Wang Yin – who leave home to seek fame and fortune in the big city. It’s an absurdist fable, with the two dogs tossed from emergency to emergency. They’re locked up, beaten up, targeted by the police and by criminal gangs, and generally abused.

Director and writer Meng Jinghui has created a kind of Chinese Goon Show for the twenty-first century: a messy satire that is part punk-rock revue, part sketch comedy show, part unclassifiable flight of the imagination. No twist is too surreal, and the performers are licensed to improvise and digress whenever the vibe feels right.