Let’s get the obvious out of the way first. There’s no way to experience Malthouse’s new production Because the Night without immediately holding it up against UK company Punchdrunk’s decade-running immersive theatre show, Sleep No More, in New York.
Two reimagined Shakespearean tragedies – at Sleep No More it’s Macbeth; here it’s Hamlet. Two former industrial spaces transformed into theatres and overtaken by rabbit-warren-type sets full of roaming performers, along with nooks and crannies that audiences can explore at will.
These are not identical productions – Punchdrunk’s show is immense, long, and far more detailed, and not all of those are necessarily good things – but there are enough similarities in structure and tone to make the comparison impossible to avoid.
So much for that. It makes sense that what is likely Australia’s first truly immersive play would come out of Malthouse Theatre, which has long been the most adventurous of Melbourne’s mainstage performing arts companies, demonstrating a willingness to take commercial and artistic risks in favour of commissioning and programming works that are a little more avant garde – from writers and performers who are a little less well known, and in circumstances that are perhaps less favourable.
Sometimes that results in work that’s scratchy, weird or simply very bad; other times the outcome is extraordinary – the gamble is necessary in order to produce the latter, a fact most artists and even arts administrators appreciate, even if they don’t always walk the talk.
Because the Night, though, is perhaps less artistically or commercially risky than it appears. It’s mapped very clearly from two strong existing properties – both the runaway success of the immersive model elsewhere and the sure-thing of a Shakespearean tragedy – in circumstances that have forced a radical reassessment of how we use and share space, and an audience growing accustomed to the unexpected.
And this is not Hamlet as we traditionally know it, though the bones of it – the son of a deceased king seeks to avenge his father’s death – are recognisable. Our protagonist (Keegan Joyce) does actually seem to be going mad. He’s anxious and jittery, haunted by dreams containing horrible visions. His lover, Ophelia (Artemis Ioannides), is having them too, only she’s not jittering when your correspondent first sees her; she’s practising her knife-play on a severed tree-trunk. (Not all audiences will see Ophelia first; the opening scene – one of only two you’re guaranteed to see – differs depending on which door your ticket instructs you to enter.)
The significance of this image only becomes clear later, as Elsinore is revealed to be a town in crisis: a logging community in a forest of ancient trees, rent by industrial disputes, the shadow of a conspiracy and worse: whispers of a massacre, a ritual, and old folk tales that seem to be taking on new potency.
The ascendence of Hamlet’s aunt Claudia (Nicole Nabout) to the throne – a neat little gender tweak that allows for more equitable casting and complexifies the power dynamic between the characters – after the death of his father, and the revelation of her relationship with Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude (Jen Vuletic), isn’t helping the prince’s state of mind. Meanwhile, Ophelia’s brother Laertes (Ras-Samuel Welda’abzgi) is striding frantically through the town, leaving notes for his sister strewn about. I’d like to tell you what their father, Polonius (Syd Brisbane), was doing but in truth, I only caught glimpses of him.
Such is the nature of this play: the narrative structure of one viewer’s experience may be almost entirely different to that of another. There are multiple doors into Elsinore; all require audience members to be cloaked and masked and silent throughout the performance. Interaction with the actors is forbidden, but interaction with the set itself encouraged.
And the set is truly the star of this show. Designed by Dale Ferguson, Marg Horwell and Matilda Woodroofe, it’s an impressive achievement – containing everything from a costume store to a mausoleum and many, many moods, helped along by J David Franzke’s sound design and Amelia Lever-Davidson’s lighting. If it has failings, it’s that some of the spaces seem underused and only really come to life when the actors are in them – and there’s no guarantee that the audience will see them in that state.
There are enough secret entrances and hidden corners, though, to sustain audience intrigue for the show’s tight 90-minute running time. I split my time between self-directed exploration and following various performers, catching key scenes that helped illuminate some of the backstory. My companion, however, told me that she spent most of the night on her own exploring the various rooms of the set, and had to be ushered to the site of the final scene.
Malthouse artistic director and co-CEO Lutton devised and directed the show and developed the text with resident artists Kamarra Bell-Wykes and Ra Chapman. Generally speaking, it works – and there’s enough peripheral information delivered by means other than the mouths of the actors to figure out what’s going on – but audiences will invariably leave the show with questions, in my case around the aforementioned conspiracy and the narrative purpose it was intended to serve. And it’s hard to know if those questions are thanks to the show’s choose-your-own-adventure design or simply holes in the plot.
There are two casts (the alternative cast includes Belinda McClory, Maria Theodorakis, Khisraw Jones-Shukoor, Harvey Zielinski, Tahlee Fereday and Rodney Afif), and the acting is heightened, even melodramatic at times, but its intensity adds to the oppressive mood of the piece. The true joy in the work, though, is in that of discovery: of indulging the instinct to sift through the drawers of someone else’s office desk or dressing table, or to play the detective in a mystery. And it’s a refreshing change to not be tied to your chair for a performance – to be able to wander off from the action and take a break, or follow your own instincts, comfortable in the knowledge that it’s all part of the show.
Theatre is always a negotiation of space and physical relationships; the separation between performers on a stage and an (ideally packed-in and sold out) audience that has become the default of mainstage companies in Australia and elsewhere speaks to a fundamentally conservative idea of what theatre is and should do. It’s heartening to see attempts to puncture holes in that in the Australian context – and in this case, the experience of it is simply great fun.
• Because the Night is now showing at Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne. Extended season tickets will go on sale next week, with shows running until 17 June
