Darkness

The biggest thrill of Darkness is walking in.  Newtown’s glorious old School of Arts has been transformed by candles and piles of bric-a-brac into a period foyer bar, while the reading room upstairs is now a gothic villa of dreams, with black and white marble rostra, the room surrounded by spooky wrought iron windows.

There Lord Byron is waiting for us, and for his friends to arrive through the apocalyptic rain and darkness that blotched out this summer of 1816 – caused in fact by a volcanic explosion in Indonesia.  Dr John Polidori, writer of the first Vampire story, the poet Percy Shelley and (soon to be) Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein, and her step-sister, Claire Clairmont, mother of Byron’s child, are soon into the drinks and hallucinogenic cocktails. They’re the infamous young Romantics, the brilliant millennials of their day, here gabbling, moody and egocentric. 

While it’s an inspired parallel to our own dark clouds in 2023, there’s not much environmental hope to expect from this mob.

Like Byron had his buddies do in that dark villa on Lake Geneva, the writers of Darkness, Andrew Bovell, Zoey Dawson, Dan Gioannoni, Megan Wilding and  director Dino Dimitriades, have each character tell a story to help quell their anxieties. 

While well-choreographed, and with a couple of these stories highly erotic, some beautifully poetic, others are obscure and tedious, with little revelation of character or worldly themes.  And the delivery is more one-tone declamatory than evocative, with few tendrils of empathy.  Byron repeats his intended suicide a few times but to little real concern.  Darkness throws little light on the enthralling true back stores of these 1816 young literati.

Dimitriades however knows how to delivery actively theatrical productions, here well-served by  Benjamin Brockman’s sharp lighting, the sexy, inventive costumes (and mysterious set) by Isabel Hudson and the ever grinding wash of Danni Esposito’s sound.

With such vivid production values, the cast of Alec Snow (Byron), Zoran Jevtic (Polidori), Jerome Meyer (Percy Shelley), Caroline L George (Mary) and Imogen Sage (Claire), still held my attention but left me more perplexed than involved – and I  didn’t play $100 for a ticket.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Phil Erbacher