Reviews

Over 27 years, Rakini Devi has developed four ‘theatre works’ to the Kali, the Hindu goddess who is the divine protector and destroyer of evil. As the culmination of her doctorial thesis into Kali iconography and how sacred Hindu iconography can relate to secular feminism, Urban Kali is a protest against the rise of racial and misogynist atrocities in India.

Director Meredith Jacobs and her design team have lovingly converted the stage of the Pavilion Theatre to a seaside cottage in Cornwall in 1937. Family photographs hang from brown picture rails. A mantle clock sits on the shelf above the fireplace. Two easy chairs with crocheted antimacassars are turned to face the sea.

To the un-initiated the whole idea would seem bizarre. A forbidden love affair between an Ethiopian slave and an Egyptian general, sung in Italian, on a beach on the Gold Coast, with the surf on one side and high-rise apartments on the other? Surely not? But Coolangatta has come a long way since the days when a big night out was a trip to Twin Towns Services Club to hear Gen Campbell sing Rhinestone Cowboy (I remember it well) and once the music starts you embrace the setting entirely and give yourself over to the extravaganza.

At the end of her one-woman show, standing in the debris it’s produced, arrayed in pink and while plastic, Madame Nightshade (Anna Thomson) asks the audience not to tell anyone about the show, ‘because it’s a secret’.  And, indeed, telling too much about it would be to give too much away.