PERTH FESTIVAL 2019

The Magic Flute ★★½
Komische Oper Berlin and 1927
His Majesty’s Theatre, Perth until Feb 23
This is the first opera I’ve been to. Ever. I’ve always considered it mutton overdressed as lamb.
The motivating reason I’m here is 1927, the innovative British theatre company who co-created this production with the Australian director Barrie Kosky,.
For newcomers to the art of theatrical illusion that 1927 specialise in, the staging of this Magic Flute is undoubtedly novel and exciting.
But once the novelty and excitement wears off, the exercise becomes disjointed, schizophrenic and, surprisingly, a little dated.
(Link here to the complete review)
 
Wot? No Fish!!  ★★★★

Danny Braverman
STC Studio until Feb 24
The stories of the great ones are carved in stone.
Around them teem millions of people with lives that pass unknown, their stories unnoticed and then forgotten, the evidence of their joys and sorrows, their increase and decrease, the circumstances of their coming and their going reduced to a few dusty lines in government files, a photograph album soon to be discarded or fading from living memory.
Since 1926 when he married his beautiful next-door neighbour Celie, Danny Braverman’s great-uncle, Ab Solomon, had taken home his payslip from the shoe factory where he worked, and given it to his wife with the housekeeping inside and a simple drawing or a painting on the outside.
Braverman tells Ab and Celie’s story in the simplest possible way, projecting a selection of these little doodles on a screen while commentating – and often speculating – about what’s happening in them.
The story of Ab and Celie that Braverman tells with good humour, taste and emotional precision is a window into the world of real people that will survive, in our common humanity, when all the statues have crumbled and there is nothing left of the great ones they memorialise but names.
(Link here to the complete review in Seesaw Magazine)

Lé Nør  ★★★★½
The Last Great Hunt
PICA until Feb 24
Lé Nør is the most ambitious work yet by The Last Great Hunt. It’s also the first time that all six members of the West Australian company have combined their talents as devisers, operators and performers in one production.
The result is awe-inspiring.
Here’s the bare bones: Lé Nør is set on the imagined North-Atlantic island city-state of Sólset (from now on I’m going to dispense with the accents and umlauts; more on them later) that has endured a terrible seven-year drought that has reduced its inhabitants to water-hoarding, water-blackmailing obsessives. When the rains finally come, they keep coming. Before long the little island faces an even more existential threat.
That’s the last you need bother about the plot. It’s the how, not the what, that this thing is about.
It’s a deep dive into a world transformed by the lens of a camera; a stage show that becomes, more completely than anything I can remember, the Grand Illusion, the making of cinema.
It’s a technical achievement, with a personality and charisma, like nothing we’ve seen from a West Australian company.
With Lé Nør the Last Great Hunt have confirmed their individual and collective stardom, and their mastery of their craft. Now it’s time for the real fun to begin.
(Link here to the complete review in Seesaw Magazine)

The Great Tamer  ★★★★½
Dimitris Papaioannou
Heath Ledger Theatre 
Dimitris Papaioannou, best known as the creator of the opening ceremony for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, is by training and inclination a visual artist, and The Great Tamer is most satisfactorily approached as an animated work of art.
This is a world without words, and without narrative. It’s Plato/Socrates’s world of forms, of timeless ideas, of sight and appearance, the original Twilight Zone.
It’s Papaioannou’s playground; it’s where Estragon and Vladimir wait and Lear is exiled. It’s Beckett and Eliot and Shakespeare distilled, first into images and then to thought.
It’s no surprise, and no accident, that Papaioannou’s final image is of a skeleton breaking apart into rubble like a ruined Greek statue. It’s skull rolls off the stage and comes to rest against – a book.
Perhaps waiting, in the marvellous game of The Great Tamer, for a Danish prince to play with.
(Link here to the complete review in Seesaw Magazine)