Reviews

From a magic wood of Athens to a different magic wood of Holly, Shakespeare’s Oberon and Puck have somehow ended up in 1934, on the set of Max Reinhardt’s plagued film production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Their Elizabethan costumes and clipped English accents ensure they blend well with the extremes of those working within the Warner Brothers studio system at that time. With this Ken Ludwig re-telling of the making of the movie, stars Victor Jory and Mickey Rooney are absent, leaving a desperate director to re-cast Oberon and Puck as themselves.

I have written and raved about the Shepherd's Purse Theatre Company before; in many ways they defy description. They are situated in the vibrant arts hub town of Tyalgum, just 20 minutes out of Murwillumbah in the Tweed Valley, on the far north coast of NSW. Their cast consists of professional actors from Brisbane and the Gold Coast and a remarkable array of local residents. What they have delivered over the last few years would stand proudly on any professional theatre stage in any capital city.

Nassim Soleimanpour is an unusual writer who is renowned for scripting text for unrehearsed performance. Echo is a deeply personal account of his own migration journey, which is fraught with the trauma of separation, the emotional tug of war between cultures, and the desperate desire to see peace and tranquillity in his homeland. The script is unrehearsed and deliberately unprepared, and a performer is invited to deliver his often-poetic prose and the experience of transporting the self into new geographical and psychological spaces.

‘Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood,’ wrote T S Eliot.  Whether these ‘late works’ by Samuel Beckett are ‘poetry’ or not, in this show his texts communicate emotionally – even viscerally - before we understand them rationally.  They leave behind an emotional residue; there is no narrative thread (until perhaps the last piece), there is no context.