Reviews

Is it just synchronicity that five musical legends all died (mostly by their own hand) at the age of 27? Is that the age at which we have to own who we are and quit hiding behind the mask of being a “kid”? For some that transition to adulthood, seriousness, responsibility, is just too hard to make. On the ‘plus’ side, an early death brings a kind of immortality to performers who might otherwise have been swept up in the juggernaut of fame and ultimately replaced and forgotten.

The Carnival of Lost Souls is a macabre yet rather engaging piece of ‘circus theatre’ in the spirit, if not scale of Cirque du Soliel. The setting for the rather loose narrative that involves desire, betrayal and revenge, is an old gothic 19th Century Music Hall.

As the audience streams in to the theatre, two old women are sitting on the stage in a typically 1950s kitchen – featuring a wooden table, a Kooka stove and an ancient Kelvinator refrigerator. What follows is a spirallingly surreal conversation which covers their lives, their ideals, death, children, their increasing loss of mind and memory and one of the funniest and most tragic shows you will ever see.

There is much that is familiar about Andrew Upton’s reworking of Three Sisters at The Drama Theatre, and much that is profoundly strange. There are the sisters alright — Olga Prozorov, at 28 the eldest, a provincial school teacher; Masha, short tempered, disappointed in marriage; Irina, youngest and desperate to return to Moscow and taste true freedom. But the time is Now, or thereabouts, not the 19th century. Duels can no longer be picked and fought. The town’s garrison doesn’t march out of town to a jaunty band.