Reviews

Mahler’s longest, wildest symphony begins with what feels like the birth of creation.  Nature is roused to life, from the boom of primordial brass to the murmuring heartbeats from the strings and woodwinds.  This is a thunderous nature, not only a pretty pastoral awakening, but a volcanic eruption of fire and rocks and, somewhere there, humankind.  This first movement is famously fractured, with a strange stop-start punctuation, not to all tastes.

This imaginative, risk-taking production takes the tropes of the horror genre to new and original places.  Each aspect is integrated into the whole: text, performance, design and sound.  It is, of course, frequently shocking, frightening or gruelling, but that’s the intention and the genre.  Here, playwright Amy May Nunn traps a gay couple, with an ostensibly ‘normal’ issues, into a haunted house.  But is the house haunted - or are they?

Folk is charming, moving, and funny, feeling less like a play than an invitation to pick up a tin whistle. The stage is open, welcoming the audience into Winnie’s lounge room where come-as-you-are acceptance is the order of the day.

And whilst Winne might be a larger-than-life depiction of a modern nun with several unholy habits, she, Stephen and Kayleigh come across as real people who are conflicted, challenged and relatable.

A Ryuichi Sakamoto quote from in 2023 emblazoned on the floor of the meeting room sets the scene for an engrossing performance.

“There is in reality a virtual me. This virtual me will not age and will continue to play the piano for years, decades, centuries.”

KAGAMI takes his rightly renowned music and combines it with an image of him playing and other images to create a virtual reality for the audience to inhabit.