The past two months I have been consumed with putting two separate shows on the stage, and have been largely unable to go and see other work. It was wonderful then, to return to the auditorium this week for Victorian Opera and Malthouse Theatre's Melbourne Festival co-pro Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets. A wild and lucid almost-opera composed by Tom Waits and written by William S. Burroughs, it somehow managed to sit between a spaghetti western, a Weimar cabaret, a fairytale and a fable, and has lodged securely in my mind like one of the bullets of the title.
The production managed to attract a truly exceptional cast, including global cabaret stars Meow Meow and Le Gateau Chocolat, local legend Paul Capsis, and VO regulars Dimity Shepherd and Kanen Breen. All of these performers are exceptionally talented on their own; gathering them together felt like the assembly of a Melbourne performing arts super-group. As the devil Pegleg, Meow Meow was the consummate cabaret performer, dragging one leg around the stage (when it suited her) and orchestrating the action. She manipulated the audience as easily and joyfully as she manipulated every other character on stage - this is the second time I have seen her in performance and she is truly so compelling to watch. Karen Breen as Wilhelm was the foil to Pegleg, the guileless clerk blinded by love, fooled into striking a bargain with the devil. He has a magnificent physical presence as a performer and was fearless here, moving from a beautifully sung, sexually charged aria with Dimity Shepherd to rolling around the stage nearly naked, wallowing in pools of blood and oil. The chamber ensemble, helmed by Phoebe Briggs, give a tight and highly professional performance, moving effortlessly from the sweetness of "The Briar and the Rose" to the jangling madness of Waits' honkey-tonk Americana numbers. They are more than a fitting accompaniment to the talent on stage.
The work itself is a curious and slippery thing - difficult to categorise and deliciously challenging to watch. I kept returning to the idea of 'dirty Brecht', the absolute underbelly of the Weimar performance style combined with Brecht's curious and often alienating dramaturgy. The dialogue is often aphoristic and gnomic, a quality that is equally at home in Brecht and fairytales. Throughout the show, Shepherd's Käthchen walks onto the stage having a terrifying lucid dream, and then snaps awake. The show itself, however, feels like one of these dreams - madcap, inescapable, and potent. The play is a churning, cranking cycle through the lucid dreams of its creators. Within this hallucinatory (and hallucinogenic) theatrical world however, is a mythic and incredibly cogent depiction of addiction. References to heroin pervade Burroughs' text, and Breen's growing dependence on the power of the magic bullets offered to him by Pegleg is a clear and powerful allegory for drug dependence. It's one of the more unforgettable performances of addiction I've seen, and puts a searing, cogent relevance at the centre of this production.
What struck and delighted me most about this show was its pure, unashamed, indulgent theatricality. Director Matthew Lutton and designer Zöe Atkinson have created a theatrical world that dances gleefully on the line between illusion and visible artifice - all the ropes and pulleys are showing, the hidey holes and flaps and trapdoors in the cardboard set are only partially hidden, and yet the operation of the show is pure magic. It's endlessly inventive and surprising, and often extremely beautiful. The show wallowed gloriously in its own unashamed theatricality. Doors that opened to reveal technicolour fable flashbacks, wild animals that popped out of the walls like demented game trophies, walls that could be split open with one of Meow Meow's impeccably gloved hands - the show was pure theatre, and the inventiveness of the theatrical world was breathtaking.
There was so much else to love in this show - Paul Jackson's predictably brilliant lighting, full of snap transitions between outrageous saturated washes and flat vaudeville states, Stephanie Lake's choreography (the shooting dance was a particular highlight), the impeccably stylised and surprisingly emotionally resonant denouement. To my mind, this show once again proved the potential for opera as a sublimely ridiculous breeding ground for groundbreaking theatrical innovations and interventions. The combination of Victorian Opera and the Malthouse, two of Melbourne's most interesting and innovative larger arts organisations, has proven fruitful in the past, is magnificent here, and will hopefully continue to create courageous and brilliant work in the future. They've got another co-production slated for 2018, and it looks similarly theatrical, mad, and magic.