Le Nor (The Rain)

First commissioned in 2019, The Last Great Hunt’s Le Nor returns to Perth Festival to be seen by a larger audience. Conceptually very exciting Le Nor (The Rain) recreates a foreign film live on stage, every night.

Set on Solset, a North Atlantic island not found on maps, The Last Great Hunt have invented a language and a whole culture. Performed in Solsetian with English surtitles, the film has an 80s New Romantic aesthetic, with dark eyeshadow, big hair and big emotions. As the film progresses, audiences are privy to not only what is happening on screen, but the film process - sometimes at odd angles or looking very different, challenging perceptions and emotional journey.

The characters include a pair of actor/wrestlers employed by the government to boost morale, a narrator come observer and the residents of an apartment building. The Last Great Hunt’s creative team, Gita Beard, Adriane Daff, Arielle Gray, Jeffrey Jay Fowler and Tim Watts are joined by Chris Isaacs, Jo Morris and Matt Edgerton to create a dynamic cast, most of whom play multiple characters in this tale that is part disaster movie, part domestic drama, and part lesbian love story.

Other contributors include camera operator Courtney Henri (who makes a quick, quirky cameo), sound designer Ben Collins (the punch noises are particularly good), costume designer Castro Jones, Technical designer Roger Miller and Stage Manager come accent coach and surtitle operator David Vikman.

While there are a couple of scenes that felt a little laboured, on the whole this is an extremely clever, very complex and technically brilliant piece of theatre - very much worth seeing.

Kimberley Shaw

Images: Daniel Grant and David Collins