All tip and no iceberg: Sydney Festival’s Tabac Rouge

Twelve years ago I saw James Thierrée’s Junebug Symphony at the Sydney Festival and fell in love with his unique – and often surreal – mixture of movement, dance, clowning, bodily contortions, and elaborate set pieces and stage machinery. While I don’t remember much of the show today, I remember two huge shadow-puppet beasts emerging from the wings of the stage, two performers at their heads, engaged in a dreamlike ballet or battle. I saw his Au Revoir Parapluie in 2008, and so the promise of another show as the centrepiece of this year’s festival was hard to resist. Unfortunately though, in Tabac Rouge we have not just another James Thierrée show, but rather The James Thierrée Show.

What you will: Sport for Jove’s Twelfth Night

Back in 2010, Bell Shakespeare’s national tour of Twelfth Night was a revelation for me. Set in the aftermath of the (then) recent Victorian bushfires, the characters emerged out of the blackness, exhausted and covered in soot, and proceeded to tell each other (and us) a story, assuming the identities and roles of the characters in Shakespeare’s play. Set around a giant pile of clothes and cardboard boxes – a refuge centre, we assumed – director Lee Lewis delighted in the playful theatricality of disguise, the simple ingenuity of switching identities at the drop of a hat, and the joy and aliveness that is never far away from the very tangible sorrow and heartbreak that sits at the core of all Shakespearean tragedy. Ending with a beautifully effervescent dance to ‘Walking on Sunshine,’ it was hard not to be moved by the panache, verve and relish in theatrical delight with which the production revelled. But then I saw Sport for Jove’s Twelfth Night and, well, I think the two are in their own ways masterpieces of their craft.

Written in 1601, Twelfth Night draws from the deep well-spring of many of Shakespeare’s comedies – twins (or siblings) separated by a disaster and then brought together by a twist of fate – and spins it into a heady tale of reflections and refractions, mirrors and echoes, love given and unsought, lost and found. The very idea of doubles or mirrors ripples through the fabric of Shakespeare’s plot and language and characters, and it’s a curiously contemporary examination into the old adage (from the very quotable Hamlet, no less) that “the clothes maketh the man.”

Mirrors, or The Play Chooses You

O, is all forgot?

All school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence?

A Midsummer Night’s Dream [III.2]

Preamble: People often talk about having a favourite Shakespeare play, the one play that they love and admire above all the others, for any number of reasons. While it’s a fantastic thing, I also think it’s not possible to have just one favourite Shakespeare play for ever, for the simple reason that as we go through life, so too do our tastes change; we keep looking in the mirror and seeing new things reflected back at us.

By my own admission, while I am a Shakespeare tragic, a bardolater if you will (I used to joke I had Bard flu), and have been for a number of years (since Year Twelve, if it matters), but it’s only quite a recent thing for me, if we talk about the passion and drive, the underlying connection to his oeuvre. Before that time, like a lot of people, Shakespeare was just this guy, you know, who wrote some plays about four-hundred years ago, and people think he’s pretty okay still… I never really ‘got’ why Shakespeare was Shakespeare, why he held such a godlike position in the literary canon. Okay, yes, Mum and Dad took me to see ‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)’ when I was twelve, and I ‘got’ enough of it to thoroughly enjoy myself. (I particularly remember the ‘balcony scene’ in Romeo and Juliet. One actor knelt in front of a chair with three tiny flowerpots strapped to his head, while another actor stood on the chair with a small watering can. ‘The balcony scene,’ the waterer said, deadpan, and the audience roared and applauded.) You could say that was the beginning, if you really wanted to.

But if you think about it, this idea of having a sequence of favourite Shakespeare plays, whether we like it or not, is actually a part of our education. Consequently, I have a theory happening, and I’m beginning to think it’s more purposeful and subtle, more conscious, than we’d ever assumed at first.