Review by Alison Stoddart
On the ground floor of the Sydney Town Hall, a removable configuration of seating has created a theatre in the round on a stage of red dirt, covering the beautiful Tasmanian blackwood and tallowwood floor. I am here for Dark Noon, part of the Sydney Festival and a show that takes over the grand Main Hall. It is a cleverly stage multi modal experience that addresses themes of oppression, repression and racism in a confronting and haunting way.
Performed by seven south African actors, six of them black, Dark Noon (a play on the 1954 movie High Noon) is presented through the prism of the western movie genre, a unique way of storytelling and uses cameras linked directly to screens to evoke the movie experience.
The show is told in chapters and starts with the uniquely American symbol of freedom, the coke can being drunk from by an early settler as he marks out his territory. What follows is a cleverly done battle between the settlers and indigenous natives, portrayed in the form of an American gridiron game. It is here that the audience participation is first employed, and I pity those in the front row who thereafter are enticed into the play as extras, although it is a great use of the audience to flesh out scenes.
How do you snuff out a culture? You start by stripping them of their land, backed up with the use of violence and guns. If there is any resistance, what do you do? Shoot them, often again and again. And voilà, the American cycle of gun violence was born. Those who hold the gun holds the power.
The tactical use of an abrupt change of pace in the form of a slave auction (with aforesaid audience members being auctioned off) was quite shocking but also paradoxically, quite funny. And with the crack of a whip and the end of the civil war, the wild west was born.
The cast members sing songs of lament, their voices rising high and pure into the three-storey space, something that I wanted to hear more of.
To watch the set being transformed into a wild west town, the slow building of a church, a tavern, shops and even a gaol was mesmerising.
Dark Noon is an immersive and fast paced piece of theatre. It is hilariously silly but also thought provoking and highly recommended.
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