Reviews

I’d seen this lavish production before, and it still wears well. In Act 1 the church of Sant' Andrea della Valle looked magnificent with layers of gold on the walls, and in the gaol of Act 3 a guard patrolled the upper level as some frightened Jews try to sleep below.

Setting the opera in Nazi Germany worked well. I particularly liked the “shepherd boy” being a young Jewish lad inside the gaol, with an uncertain future. In the second act Scarpia molests an embarrassed female officer in front of the other soldiers.

Daley King, writer of Hold Your Breath (Count to Ten), has issues. Fed up with the inability of theatre to tackle some issues, he is determined to make a theatre piece that deals with his own emotional, mental and physical debilities.

This doesn’t sound like the most uplifting premise for a play, and regular theatre-goers have all seen sagas of the depressed or broken artist before, but Hold Your Breath (Count to Ten) has a wonderfully fresh approach and this World Premiere from Antifragile is thoroughly engaging from start to finish.

In the first few moments of West Australian Opera’s latest production, a collection of gorgeously attired forest animals crawl, slide and bound on to the stage. It is the first sign that The Cunning Little Vixen is not your usual opera.

As this rather discombobulating play begins and you try to get a handle on it – or at least a reference point in the ‘real world’- you might be thinking, ‘Yasmina Reza… meets Harold Pinter?’  There is the polite bourgeois surface – about to be disrupted; there is the sense of imminent menace.  A previous reviewer cited Joe Orton and Rosemary’s Baby.  All these apply – and then some.  Meaning or comprehension keep dissolving, slipping away.  The seemingly banal becomes bizarre.  Normal social niceti