Loopy Equine Performance Happens, Audiences Bemused and Delighted

In the true spirit of fringe performance, Mary Anderson’s Horse Opera! An Epic Pageantwas neither operatic, nor epic. The show, written and directed by Californian Fulbright scholar Anderson, was based on fragments from famous literature and stories from early European settlers to Australia, references to animals - especially horses - throughout. It is useful to highlight at this point that none of the content of the script is in anyway important to the success of the performance. The show itself is awfully constructed (!) and a couple of the performances extraordinarily rough, but the fact that it was delivered in such an un-pretentious manner, directed in a truly absurd way, and that it was presented in a fringe festival meant that they got away with it. Just. It was, in point of fact, charming - and one of the more enjoyable nights in the theatre I’ve had for a little while – simply because the show has style.

Horse Opera! An Epic PageantFrom the moment you walk into the theatre and see the small plastic animals positioned around the stage, the projector with more toy animals on it and a broken hills hoist on wheels – one is aware of a particular aesthetic. When Anderson and her co-designer Noni Gander come on to the stage at the beginning wearing roller skates and holding a cardboard cut-out of a horse with “Horse Opera!” written on the side, the aesthetic is confirmed; and so it goes on….

The classic literature (though I could understand but a few words of it) was relayed to us by an Australian outback style yarn-spinning narrator, played by Martin Blackwell, whose performance was replete with unnecessary hand gestures and an Aussie hat that completely obscured his eyes.

Music was relayed to us by a band on the side of the stage made up of double bass, guitar and featuring the fantastic voice of Mark Joseph, who managed through his presence to give the evening some sort of class.

But the accidental stars of the evening were without question, the dancers. Louisa D’arville and Tom Jackson wearing blond and brown curly wigs respectively and dressed in skin tight eighties style dance clothing, delighted with their unending energy and strange facial expressions. Particularly of note was one section when Jackson started jumping on a small trampoline randomly declaiming a list of houses: ”share house, my house……”.

The crowd was bemused and delighted by all of it, and it was a very happy group of people that left the theatre.

Matthew Dewey
http://www.matthewdewey.com

Horse Opera! An Epic Pageant played at the Peacock Theatre in April and May during the 2008 Hobart Fringe Festival.