The Junebug Symphony by James Thierree and La Compagnie du Hanneton. State Theatre: The Sydney Festival. January 16-25.
For a summer festival in Tinsel Town this show is real glitter. It's the French version of Circus Oz - terrific acrobatics, with a special note of admiration for contortionist Raphaelle Boitel, all thoroughly mixed up with images of fantasie extraordinaire.
Like all good circus you can enjoy it from 3 to 300, and there were some great observations made in the most dramatic silences by unselfconscious very little ones on opening night. After all it is hard not to respond when, as Thierree describes it, "a man loses his head, his legs and his arms, but not his temper".
The pièce de résistance has to be the final scene of a kind of mediaeval mayhem where an armoured insect wearing cutlery and other kitchenware battles something vaguely like a soft toy, each "animal" played by 2 people.
On the way people had great difficulty on either side of a door with no walls, with a wardrobe which produced a surprising range of very loud music, with books that burst into flame, and so many other unsettling experiences packed into 90 minutes that I can't remember them all. The junebug caused all this wierdness in the mind of the man by buzzing around so he couldn't sleep. That's when he began to lose his head ....
Of course, if you really feel the need, you can look for the "Surrealism, primarily an artistic movement, [which] concerns the expression of the imagination as it is revealed in dreams" as Erica Fryberg explains in her very serious program notes. But I suggest you just let the visual and musical jokes have their place in the Sydney sun and leave the Dada stuff to the Samuel Beckett part of the Festival. Or to the London Daily Telegraph, no less, which we are told invited "comparisons with Dali and Chagall...."
Why not simply enjoy laughing at the erratic junebug (mayfly in English) and appreciate the acrobatic skills of Thierree, Boitel, Uma Ysamat (also an excellent operatic singer) and the mime Magnus Jakobsson. We can worry about the existential nightmare when we grow up - maybe when we get to 300. For me the Junebug Symphony was much more fantastical fun than the Lord of the Rings.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
No comments:
Post a Comment