Chasing dreams: The Last Great Hunt’s Falling Through Clouds (Sydney Festival)

While Perth-based theatre collective The Last Great Hunt are a relatively new ensemble, their reputation and work is not. As the creators of previous Sydney Festival shows such as The Adventures of Alvin Sputnik: Deep Sea Explorer (2011) and It’s Dark Outside (2013), they have forged a name for themselves as makers of highly theatrical means using little more than a blank stage, clever masking and projections, and the audience’s imagination. So it is with their most recent offering, Falling Through Clouds, presented at the Seymour Centre as part of this year’s About An Hour program.

Tonight we fly: Belvoir's Peter Pan

It’s surely the best opening in literature: “All children, except one, grow up.” As J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, a tale of childhood and growing up – of dreaming and pirates, adventures and flying and giant ticking crocodiles – unfolds across the walls of your mind (and, appropriately, the open-book corner of Belvoir’s upstairs theatre), it’s hard not to feel as though you’re a part of it, whether you’re an adult, a child, or a child-at-heart.

Nothing compares to or prepares you for the homespun earthy magic of Belvoir’s production. Directed by Ralph Myers, Belvoir’s Peter Pan is just about the most beautiful piece of theatre you could see this summer, full of the crazy infectious kind of dreaming and playing and make-believe that children excel at so well, and it’s a tribute to the collective imaginations – of both the creative team, the cast, and the audience – that this production works as well as it does.