By Hungry Ghost Theatre
Adapted from The Tales of Hoffman
Commerce Way City 12 Midnight Sunday - Tuesday until Feb 7, 1995
This review published in Jan 1995 in The Melbourne Times (or maybe it was the Herald Sun? II don’t have the details anymore.) KH
According to the Hungry Ghost Theatre version of the tale of The Sandman, he does not send you happily to dozy land but throws sand in children's eyes until they pop out of their heads and then he feeds them to his children on the moon.
This is no kiddy-winks company. They perform at midnight in a grungy lane off Flinders Street, employing huge shadows playing over distressed concrete walls, Actors fly down in harness, eerie children's lullabies are played on xylophone and there is a plethora of gruesome eyeballs including some giant floating helium-filled ones.
The impact of the location cannot be under-estimated. Who needs to design post-modern urban decay when we are surrounded by it in the city centre? The horror of the story is heightened by the chill of Commerce Lane. The stylisation of both language and movement and the fragmentation of the tale itself, add to the weirdness of the experience. The greatest horror, however, was a mouse scuttling over my feet and into the bowels of the building.
The performance is a little uneven with a few flat patches and an unfortunate problem with a radio mike, but it challenges conceptions of storytelling, implements some courageous stunts and imaginative visuals and investigates the dark and the mystical. Themes of vision, sight and short-sightedness are reiterated (hence the eyeball motif!) and the boy's night-horrors about the vile Sandman evolve into the tragic obsession of the man.
KATE HERBERT
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