Night Night harks back to one of The Last Great Hunt’s earliest and most beloved productions, The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik, a Pixar movie-style fable set in a drowned future world. Sputnik showcased the work of Tim Watts, who may be described as the company’s resident techno-geek and animation wizard, as well as being one of its star performers (he’s a master puppeteer and a beautiful clown).
It’s also reminiscent of It’s Dark Outside, in which Watts played second fiddle as supporting shadow-puppeteer/animator to another of the company’s most accomplished performers Arielle Gray. Their new show also draws on the company’s disaster-movie-inspired environmental epic Lé Nør [The Rain], which was set in an imaginary Nordic country during a flood and featured spectacular use of live-feed projection and visual trickery, as well as being performed entirely in an invented Nordic language (with surtitles).
Night Night saw Watts and Gray reunited as an onstage duo and co-creators/co-directors in collaboration with Luke Kerridge, whose work creating theatre for young people as the erstwhile Artistic Director of Barking Gecko has included previous collaborations with Watts and Gray, and employed a range of multimedia (including animation) to explore similar magic-realist terrain. In this case, they’ve created a sci-fi fable about a scientist called Pip (Gray) in an imaginary territory in Antarctica who’s obsessed with the origins of life on earth.
As was the case with It’s Dark Outside, Gray anchored things with a touching central performance, deftly supported by Watts, who did all the animation (hand-held and digital – the latter using AI as generative material) and continuous live-feed camera trickery. He also played all the other characters both onstage and onscreen, memorably including Pip’s devoted research assistant, as well as a glowing hand-puppet stick figure – the two performers’ onstage rapport was the glowing heart of the show.
And as in Lé Nør (which was also animated by the onstage and offstage esprit de corps of the entire Hunters ensemble), here again the performers used an invented language as citizens of an imaginary nationality; though in this case the show was visually driven, apart from short sporadic outbursts of dialogue that sounded like ducks quacking.
The show was both charming and dazzling, but occasionally the thread of the narrative was lost. This was partly because the viewer could be distracted by the technical trickery or felt torn between watching what was happening onstage and onscreen, but also because of the occasional dramaturgical black hole.Â
As is sometimes the case with the Hunters’ work there was super abundance of form over content. The latter seemed to rely on tropes from popular film – Spielberg and ET loomed large, along with Pixar films like Toy Story and WALL-E – at the expense of more a fully developed plot, characters or dialogue. As in those films, there was also a generic ambiguity in the work about whether it was meant for adults, children, child-like adults or ‘the child in all of us’. This ambiguity is possibly intentional, but sometimes it serves as an alibi for dramaturgical short-cuts or sentimentality.
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Like the films just mentioned, however, there is also a vein of melancholy that runs through all the Hunters’ work. Sometimes this also slides into sentimentality, but at its best – that is to say, when animated by love – it gestures towards a sense of melancholy solidarity with the planet, especially in the era of disaster capitalism. As such, Night Night was a moving and timely work that continues to haunt me.
Night Night
State Theatre Centre WA
Creators:Â Arielle Gray, Luke Kerridge, Tim Watts
Co-Directors:Â Arielle Gray, Luke Kerridge, Tim Watts
Composer:Â Rachel Claudio
Performers:Â Arielle Gray, Tim Watts
Night Night was performed 26 February to 2 March 2025 as part of Perth Festival.
