The Rabbits

The Rabbits is marvellous.  It is a fabulous, imaginative combination of the visual and the aural into a spectacle that is wholly original, entertaining, funny, frightening and moving.  It runs for sixty-five minutes and you can’t take your eyes off the stage.  The brown marsupials inhabit the land.  Then the white rabbits invade – or ‘colonise’ – the land.  The rabbits bring their science and their diseases, their culture and their destructions.  A familiar story - and yet The Rabbits proves that via allegory and symbol the familiar can become new and more meaningful than you knew.

No one element of this success should be singled out, but much credit must go to the unique imagination of Shaun Tan.  In the original book, his ‘illustrations’ – a completely inadequate term in this case – to John Marsden’s deceptively simple poetic text provide the inspiration for Gabriela Tylesova’s costumes.  There are the bilby-like marsupials (Hollie Andrew, Jessica Hitchcock, Lisa Maza, Marcus Corowa and David Leha) with their curly tails and huge soft eyes.  And there are the conquering white rabbits with their long ears and pointed ship’s prow chests: a Scientist (Kanen Breen), a Society Rabbit (Nicholas Jones), a Convict (Christopher Hillier), a Lieutenant (Simon Meadows) and The Captain (Robert Mitchell), each a clear exaggeration of the defining qualities that they bring to a new land.  You might think the suggestive, allusive costumes are cumbersome, but the entire cast wields them with ease – the costumes are the characters they inhabit.

There are also the towering ships in which the rabbits – more and more rabbits – arrive, their flags, their Heath-Robinson-ish vehicles and the smoking chimneys of their industries.  At the centre of this ochre land is a kind of monolith or ziggurat in sandstone colours, suggestive too of the Tower of Babel.  Trent Suidgeest’s elaborate, complex lighting complements and enhances look and mood – from rosy glow to icy frost. 

The libretto is by Lally Katz and with this show she demonstrates the range of her talents.  We’ve seen the kooky confessionals and the eccentric neighbours and so on.  But here, as well as wry wit, there is real emotion.  Ms Katz operates in opera-like grandiloquence, Gilbert & Sullivan pastiche, pop and blues, her lyrics (at times they could be more distinct) matching Mr Marsden’s original text in economy and sophisticated simplicity.  And the composer is Kate Miller-Heidke, a musician who moves with ease (well, she makes it look easy) between pop and opera, sometimes colouring the former with the latter.  She too is part of the action as ‘Bird’ (an addition to the source material), overseeing the unfolding story from the top of the tower, at times with clear and bird-like wordless calling, at other times with aria-like comment.  The musical styles, with additional music and arrangements by Iain Grandage, run together seamlessly – ‘mash-up’ is not at all the right word - although for me the show is more music theatre than ‘opera’.  Musical Director is Isaac Hayward who pulls together an ‘orchestra’ that is more of a band in which a mere five musicians play multiple instruments and occasionally join the action, looking like buskers or a mob that’s escaped a circus.

Overall credit and much praise must go, however, to director John Sheedy of Barking Gecko Theatre Company of West Australia.  He read Marsden and Tan’s book and, despite there being no plot or characters (a fact that struck Ms Miller-Heidke right off), was haunted and inspired by it.  He saw the potential for a completely original show in it, pulled the elements and such well chosen collaborators together and drove its development – all the time encouraged and aided by Lyndon Terracini of Opera Australia – and it is Opera Australia’s Workshop that has produced the wonderful scenery, props and costumes.  I suspect they had fun.

As a production – and despite its ‘simplicity’, it is a very elaborate production – every detail has been given close attention and everything ‘works’, never distracting from our enjoyment and wonder.

As I write this, I hear that The Rabbits deservedly cleaned up at the Helpmann Awards.  There is already bleating and whingeing in some predictable quarters about ‘taxpayer funded vilification of Australia’.  That reductive and simplistic reaction misses the point.  The Rabbits is a hugely accomplished music theatre show.  It depicts some events that did happen (and happened elsewhere too) in its own allegorical way and, if it is didactic, never have didactics been more thoroughly disguised, refreshed and sweetened by theatrical brilliance.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Toni Wilkinson