Melbourne Festival: A Ghost in My Suitcase

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL 2018
A Ghost in My Suitcase
Barking Gecko Theatre
18 October 2018
Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne
to 21 October
www.festival.melbourne

"A Ghost in My Suitcase". Barking Gecko Theatre

I've worked in the arts for ever because in the 1970 and 80s, my family took me to shows at festivals in Adelaide; some weren't for kids. There's been some wonderful shows and experiences that kids and enjoy with their grown ups this festival – the Lexicon circus, Fire Gardens or the delightfully creepy (and affordable) 1000 Doors – with the highlight being the premiere of Barking Gecko's A Ghost in My Suitcase.

The Perth based company make exquisite theatre for children that never excludes adults. One of my favourite shows last year was their Bambert’s Book of Lost Stories at Arts Centre Melbourne and I loved The Rabbits at MIAF 2015.

Playwright Vanessa Bates adapted Gabrielle Wang's novel, which won the 2009 Aurealis Award for Best Children’s Novel.

Celeste (Alice Keohavong) is 12 and arrives at the Shanghai airport where she's met by Por Por (Amanda Ma), her mother's mother. Celeste's mum has recently died and Celeste has left her little brother and French dad in Australia to take for mum's ashes back to the Isle of Clouds in China where her mum was born. Things don't go well when she meets Ting Ting (Yilin Kong), her grandmother's adopted daughter, but that's not as weird as finding out that Por Por is a ghost catcher. Or that Celeste might have the same ghost catching skills that are passed down maternal lines and that she'll need them when they go back to the family home.

The combination of projection – from the crowds of Shanghai to a boat ride through a rural village – puppetry (design, Zoe Atkinson; lighting, Matthew Marshall), live action and martial arts brings the story to life in a recognisable world where fantasy and the super natural feel natural and real.

Co-directors Ching Ching Ho and Barking Gecko's Artistic Director Matt Edgerton always find the heart of the story and its characters and make sure that the story of grief and letting go leads even when there are angry ghosts to fight and lives are in danger. It’s a little bit scary but so full of love and loving characters that the scary is fun.

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL: The Rabbits

The Rabbits
Melbourne Festival, Arts Centre Melbourne, Opera Australia, Barking Gecko, West Australian Opera, Perth International Arts Festival
10 October 2015
Arts Centre Melbourne, Playhouse
to 13 October
www.festival.melbourne

The Rabbits is an hour-long opera based on a 1998 children's picture book. Its Melbourne Festival season is sold out and as the Playhouse exploded with joy at the end of last night's performance, it's clear that this remarkable new Australian opera is going to be around for a very long time.

Adapted and directed by Barking Gecko's John Sheedy, it's a co-production with Opera Australia in association with WA Opera and was commissioned by the Perth and Melbourne festivals. Ostensibly an opera for children, it’s an amazing introduction to the form and sound of opera – and the many children who saw it were mesmerised  – but its levels of complexity and understanding never excludes an adult audience.

The original book is a 32-page, 228-word analogy about English-style rabbits invading and colonising a country of marsupials. It won awards, has been published all over the world, and remains a best seller and favourite book with John Marsden's powerful words and Shaun Tan's exquisite illustrations, which can’t be seen without finding something new. This production captures the heart and essence of the book and brings it to stage by creating characters from a story that doesn't have characters.

It begins with the introduction of a narrator, a white bird inspired from the brolgas on the end pages (the decorative pages inside the cover) and is told through five marsupials (Hollie Andrew, Jessica Hitchcock, Lisa Maza, Marcus Corowa and David Leha) and five rabbits (Kanen Breen, Nicholas Jones, Christopher Hillier, Simon Meadows and Robert Mitchell). Images like the steam-punk-like bike the rabbits enter on, handing a cog to the marsupials, and a lizard in the test tube are moments that are easy to miss on the pages but have become the turning points and drive of the stage story.

Lally Katz incorporates the Marden's sparse text into the libretto and lets the characters, who are inspired by the illustrations, tell their personal stories and do what they can’t do in the book: reflect on their actions.

Kate Miller-Heidke's composition and Iain Grandage's arrangements and additional music is welcoming to new ears and to opera buffs, who can spot the references. The combination of English-style opera and a more contemporary music-theatre style celebrates the sound and form of opera, while never being afraid to embrace music that isn’t associated with old-style opera.

Without trying to capture the endless complexity of the illustrations, Gabriela Tylesova's design takes details and makes them so real that it feels like walking into the world of the book. The mask and costumes for the marsupials and rabbits look like Tan's creatures but allow the performers to be seen (similar in style to Julie Taymor's Lion King design). And with lighting designer Trent Suidgeest, the scene where the babies fly away on kites is almost too much to bear.

With the September release of the National Opera Review, there's a lot of discussion about the value of opera as a form and of the ongoing existence of Australia's subsidised opera companies.

Then along comes The Rabbits. This is an Australian story made with Australian voices that shows how wonderful Australian opera can be. Along with last year’s co-production of The Riders by Victorian Opera and Malthouse Theatre, it's time to be excited about opera in Australia and time to stop asking if opera has a place, but to ask why our resources aren't being used to make more productions like this.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

The Rabbits. Melbourne Festival. Photo by Jon Green