Image: via Sydney Festival
For playwright Kate Mulvany, Kit Williams’ 1979 magical picture book story Masquerade sustained her through many bed-ridden years as a child suffering a rare cancer.
It’s the story of a hare charged by the Moon to deliver a brilliant amulet to the Sun as a declaration of her love. It’s a tortuous journey through some colourful characters and episodes and, like for the hare, the reader only advances by solving riddles.
Mulvany traced down the reclusive Williams in country England and he gave permission for her stage adaptation but only if she incorporated her own often dark experience of the book. The result is a co-production between Griffin Theatre Company and the State Theatre Company of SA, opening at the Sydney Festival.
Centre stage in a hospital bed, Tessa, a single mother, reads the story to the stricken boy, Joe, conjuring the beguiling long-eared Jack Hare and his kaleidoscopic, somewhat rambling adventures.
The always appealing Helen Dallimore brings an earnest truth to Tessa and Adelaide’s Nathan O’Keefe is brilliantly dexterous and nuanced as the dim, if kindly Jack. Sharing his quest, we meet the pining, beautiful Moon and the wind-inducing Tara Treetops (both Kate Cheel) and Melbourne’s Mikelangelo plays the Sun as a wonderful old rocker strumming guitar and depressed that people always squint when they look at him.
Mikelangelo also leads an eclectic handful of performer/musicians serving us up the odd fine song in vaudeville mode with accordion, double bass and lost of percussion.
The addition of Mulvany’s own story underlines the dark underbelly of Masquerade, a story for children about both the revelation of love and also death, including that of a little boy. One provocative character The Man Who Plays The Music Which Makes The World Go Around (Pip Branson) regularly pauses in his strumming, denoting yet another soul who has passed from the world.
Younger audiences may also be a touch confused by the rambling double plot and the often hasty parade of eclectic characters. Designer Anna Cordingley creates a feast of fantastical bright costumes but her set, around the curtained hospital bed, makes for a sometimes cluttered telling of the voyage. And while Mulvany’s script is witty and touching, some scenes are laboured and long while others leap to unexplained conclusions. A few clunky technical cues on opening night didn’t help.
Directors Lee Lewis and Sam Strong create a moving and sometimes thoughtfully dark story but, given their joint expertise and despite committed performances, the theatrical stage punctuation is surprisingly irregular. The young actor as Joe, at least on opening night, also failed to fully command the central focus of the story.
Masquerade
Sydney Opera House
7-17 January 2015
Directors: Sam Strong and Lee Lewis
With: Jack Andrew, Pip Branson, Kate Cheel, Helen Dallimore, Louis Fontaine, Nathan O’Keefe, Zindzi Okenyo, Mikelangelo
Sydney Festival 2015
www.sydneyfestival.org.au
8-26 January
