Founded in Sydney almost four decades ago, physical theatre company Legs on the Wall is renowned for their use of visual spectacle to confront hard issues and prompt deeper reflection. At this year’s Sydney festival, the company’s artists performed on top of a 2.5 tonne iceberg suspended 20 metres above Sydney Harbour in a commentary on climate change. And in 2018 and 2019, they toured Man with the Iron Neck, a powerful show that used aerial theatre to explore suicide among Indigenous Australians.
This week, in a headline show for Brisbane festival, the company premieres a new co-production: Holding Achilles, a queer reclaiming of the Iliad that tells the love story of Achilles and Patroclus through a mix of ultra-physical theatre, visual spectacle and puppetry on a grand scale.
Holding Achilles is a first-time collaboration between Legs on the Wall and Queensland’s Dead Puppet Society, the company behind the award-winning 2016 production The Wider Earth, which reimagined Charles Darwin’s voyage to Australia with intricate and extraordinary puppetry and toured to the UK, as well as 2021’s Ishmael, a hi-tech, gender-flipped space age take on Moby Dick.
Speaking to the Guardian, Legs on the Wall artistic director, Joshua Thomson, called the collaboration with Dead Puppet Society’s founders David Morton and Nicholas Paine a “no-brainer”.
“We sit in very similar visual spaces, but our expertise is quite separate, and I think that’s evident in this work – it surpasses anything one company could do,” he says.
The set, co-designed by Morton and Anna Cordingley (Van Gogh Alive, Jasper Jones) features a 2.4 metre gold and silver disc – representing the sun and the moon – suspended over the circular stage, upon which bodies hurtle, fight and fly with Legs on the Wall’s signature acrobatic prowess.
The original score is co-written by composer Tony Buchen, Grizzly Bear drummer Chris Bear and musician Montaigne, who also performs live in the show. With funding from the Australia Council’s major festivals initiative, and financial backing from London-based production company Glass Half Full, it’s a likely bet Holding Achilles will tour nationally and internationally in the future.
Commanding the stage alongside the two warrior lovers – played by Stephen Madsen and Karl Richmond – is the figure of Heracles, who morphs into an oversized bear operated by five rod puppeteers. Other puppetry feats include an armada of 77 30cm-high ships, appearing in the pivotal moment when Achilles and Patroclus pledge their enduing love for one another as Hector and his Trojan forces prepare to strike.
The idea for the show came from Morton and Paine in the wake of Australia’s toxic marriage equality debate; as partners in both life and business, they wanted to strip away the layers of heteronormativity that have been applied to the story of Achilles and Patroclus over the centuries and removed the romantic elements from the ambiguous relationship between the two great mythical warriors of ancient Greece.
In the eighth century BCE, when Homer is believed to have created his epic Iliad and Odyssey masterpieces, a romantic relationship between Achilles and the man he loved “beyond all other comrades, loved as my own life” – Patroclus – would not have been controversial. But centuries of homophobic and heteronormative western interpretation has changed the love story, be it romantic or otherwise, into what is often framed as an unambiguous manly friendship between comrades in arms, bound together through undying loyalty.
Scholars have argued through the centuries about the nature of the relationship between the two, often applying modern day concepts of sexuality to an ancient world where labels of homosexuality and bisexuality were largely irrelevant. As US Greek literature and culture academic Gregory Jusdanis puts it: “To make Achilles and Patroclus gay is not historically false in the way it would be if they were given Facebook accounts or were discussing multiculturalism over cappuccino.”
When the 2017 Australian postal vote for marriage equality took place, alongside damaging and discriminatory public debate, Dead Puppet Society were on the cusp of premiering the company’s production of Laser Beak Man, a feelgood show with a utopian vision of a more diverse and inclusive world.
“The thing that we just kept asking ourselves is, why are we so silent in this time, when there’s such upheaval happening in a community that we’re a part of?” Morton says. “As storytellers, there was a responsibility … to give a voice in this.”
When the right to marry regardless of sex or gender was enshrined in Australian law that December, Morton believed the seismic change in public attitudes towards same-sex relationships opened up new fields of artistic exploration – outside the strictures of specifically queer content and into the mainstream.
“Dead Puppet Society has been very focused on the reimagining of well-known stories from the western canon and remixing characters, putting a new spin on those characters in the stories that they inhabit, to speak to more contemporary issues,” he says. “As happens with all the great stories, they get reinvented through time by each generation that encounters them – which was one of the reasons I was drawn to the story of Achilles.
“It seemed like it was too good to be true for us not to dive into this material … to put a contemporary stamp on what a gay love story might look like.”
Holding Achilles runs at QPAC theatre in Brisbane until 10 September, as part of Brisbane festival.
