Dark Noon

Within the colonial magnificence of the Sydney Town Hall, seven South African actors run riot with their version of how European emigrants, desperate and white (“when white didn’t matter”), violently scrambled for a foothold in the American West. 

The land was grabbed, all morality ignored, non-whites dispossessed and murdered, the Frontier Myth was born and anarchic cowboys and their guns were the heroes. The mostly black actors, in bad blonde wigs and powdered whiteface, are hilarious and terrifying as they enact an alternative history of how America’s violent gun culture and ultimate white supremacy and US exceptionalism was forged.

Dark Noon kicks off with a cowboy street duel (while another actor rolls by – as a tumbleweed!), then an interracial football game but the laughter dies when the whites start slaughtering the winning black team.  White-washed old cowboy movies are constantly ridiculed; at the end each South African fiercely condemns them – remembering as a kid  the guns they learnt to adore, and to use during apartheid.

Appropriately, a large screen projects actors giving a spiky narrative to the action or being filmed by mobile onstage cameras, capturing compelling moments, especially as they build a Western shanty town through the performance, and interior scenes are made cinema.  And as civilisation conquers, even a railroad is added.

The audience is increasingly enlisted, to fill the mission church, to join Native Americans behind the wire, to escape from genocidal cowboys or to be sold off by mad whites at a slave auction. 

Dark Noon is outstanding kaleidoscopic action theatre, which somehow escapes being doctrinaire, with its satirical episodic storytelling and inherently thoughtful and witty script by Danish director Tue Biering, working with choreographer Nhlanhla Mahlangu. The actors too josh with the audience good humouredly, between rushing, bantering and arguing with each other, their rhythms distinctly South African. Indeed, Dark Noon finally swells into indecipherable chaos, but then who said genocide is linear and comprehensible.

Dark Noon, a fix+foxy production for Sydney Festival, features Mandla Gaduka, Katlego Kaygee Letsholonyana, Lillian Malulyck, Bongani Bennedict Masango, Siyambonga Alfred Mdubeki, Joe Young and Thulani Zwane, all inventively costumed by Camilla Lind.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Victor Frankowski