Adelaide Festival. The Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm, Liurai Fo’er and Galaxy. Queen’s Theatre. 1 Mar 2013
For an overture, the Timorese band Galaxy played loud grunge while they randomly and awkwardly meandered about the stage like dodg’em cars. I was wondering who let these guys out of the garage but The Age claims “the musicians in Galaxy are among Timor’s leading lights.” What follows is one of the most intriguing and exotic collages of narrative, mysticism, mystery, multimedia, mythology, sadness, abstraction and humour you would ever see. Only partly in English, with some subtitling, and clothed with Timorese culture, the arc of the story will reveal itself at your own velocity. If you got it sorted before the rooster makes its entrance, you are doing pretty well. You could cheat and preview the show on the net - your experience of this show would be irrevocably altered for doing so.
The combined creative juices of the contributing companies were focused by austere and isolated script development conditions in Timor-Leste over a rather long gestation period to create this work from an existing theatrical product. A big shiny gold star for innovation. I was astonished how frequently the action mutated and shifted – short traces of dialogue morphed into moving images or took a 90 degree turn into a Brechtian exchange. Lighting design and the interjection of guitar and percussion aided the disorientation. The visual imagery and set design evoke a waking dream of unusual juxtapositions. It was all rather trippy and pleasantly shambolic.
You can layer in your own interpretation concerning the origins of the story from the Bible, or parallels with the Indonesian occupation and the struggle for independence, or the continuing civil disruption. All these will only enrich and personalise your experience.
This is an, at first, enigmatic, but later a stark and violent tale of a communal practice of revenge gone horribly wrong with supernatural consequences. You won’t be disappointed.
David Grybowski
When: 1 to 4 Mar
Where: Queen’s Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
