Content warning: this review mentions rape, violence and slavery.
Did you ever play Cowboys and Indians? Elements that are lost or overlooked because of childhood innocence are the foundation of Dark Noon, an immersive piece of theatre that unpicks the idealism of the Wild West ‘frontier’, which ito many remains the cornerstone of the American dream of a land of opportunity.
Staged at Sydney Town Hall for Sydney Festival 2025, Dark Noon is testament to the saying that ‘a little distance can offer clarity’. Co-directed by Dane Tue Biering (Fix & Foxy) and South Africa’s Nhlanhla Mahlangu, and featuring a brilliant South African cast of seven high-energy players, this production is honed and tight.
In short, Dark Noon shows the Wild West literally built before your eyes. As one enters the transformed colonial administrative building of Sydney Town Hall, bleachers abutt a field of parched, arid and vacant land. By the time you leave, that space has been totally built over with a rolling history of skeletal structures: banks, jails, churches, saloons, brothels, a school house – you get the whole Wild West picture. Heck, so many of us have all been nurtured on it since childhood (thanks Hollywood!).
The realisation of that act – from vacant land to jarring settlement – settles in as one digests this immersive, fast-paced piece of theatre, which leaves one with lingering questions of our own footprint and histories on unceded lands.
The production rolls out as familiar chapters: the pioneer land grab, gold, god and so on. But it is the staging of Dark Noon that turns those rote narratives on their head. The audience becomes not only witness to this retake, but also an active participant in it. It is a wry twist on our role as contemporary protagonists in a similar tale.
The production starts with actors, curled up like tumbleweeds, rolling across the vacant stage, followed by your typical quick-draw Western shootout played-out in slow-motion. The players wear disheveled blonde wigs and have whitened faces.
A narrator in a sound booth off to the side – and projected on an enormous screen overhead – ushers you through this familiar tale with a healthy dose of levity. Also projected are live cam feeds, which intensify choice moments, from a simulated rape in a jail cell, to a ‘Settlers versus Natives’ baseball game with the ‘commentator’ embedded in the audience.
And as all points of friction in this tale, the solution is simple. Shoot them – in some cases, again and again and again – in an unsettling staging that blurs comedy with confrontation.
From the outset two things are clear: this is a myth-busting, dark and satirical take on the rose-coloured version of America’s grand history, and secondly, that those who holds the gun, hold the power.
A constant across this narrative – as if drummed home by its repetition in a compressed reading of time – is the role that the gun played (and continues to play) in American history. The notions of freedom, civil justice and the right to dream seem to increasingly evaporate as time passes, exemplified by one actor who delivers the line, “the wilderness eroded me”.
Audio and song are used brilliantly, either to create space to pause on a particularly moment – the theatrical equivilent of an exclamation mark that forces a quick rethink – or to pad out (often with humour) the scene. For example, the iconic song ‘Fever’, blends into a soulful slave song as the chaos of the gold rush, migrants and zeal for the railway further complicates notions of the American dream. Another great moment is a railroad track laid centre stage that becomes the path for a saddled rider – aka the cowboy – with a lo-fi amplified ‘clip-clop’.
Read: Music review: Rufus Wainwright, Sydney Festival
These ideals, fleshed out across Dark Noon, are anchored in a hard reality at the close of the last scene. It is followed with each of the actors speaking to camera – and hence to the audience via the screen – of their own stories about childhood memories of westerns and their shoulder-rub with the realities of growing up in Apartheid South Africa.
One speaks of not understanding English but being tutored in violence by Westerns watched on the only television in his village, powered by a car battery. Another ponders, looking back, whether it was healthy to be exposed to that kind of violence where the white man always wins.
But the belly-punch of the production is its last line, delivered in native language: “If you want to kill an African story tell it in English”.
This is an incredible and thoughtful piece: physical theatre that does not comprise on its ability to also humour and entertain audiences.
Dark Noon
Produced by Glynis Henderson Productions & The Pleasance
Cast: Bongani Bennedict Masango, Joe Young, Kaygee Letsholonyana, Lillian Malulyck, Mandla Gaduka, Siyambonga Alfred Mdubeki and Thulani Zwane
fix+foxy Creative Team
Director and Scriptwriter: Tue Biering
Choreographer and Co-Director: Nhlanhla Mahlangu
Set Designer: Johan Kølkjær
Sound Designer: Ditlev Brinth
Lighting Designer: Christoffer Gulløv
Props Designer: Marie Rosendahl Chemnitz
Costume Designer: Camilla Lind
Video Designer: Rasmus Kreiner
Dark Noon is performed until 23 January at Sydney Town Hall as part of Sydney Festival 2025
Tickets: $89-$119
