★★★★½ Technically brilliant, conceptually challenging and wholly engaging.

Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
February 25, 2016

Elegantly dressed citizens attend a gallery set behind a scrim. They obsessively and repetitively compare each other under the watchful eye of Dürer’s Young Hare, until the mechanically inquisitive, ego-driven, yet juvenile evaluations, lead to the cracking and deflating of an individual. The golden calf of aestheticism is omnipresent as an early nod to the subject; the life of Moses, as narrated in the Book of Exodus. The house lights are still up, and some think the performance is yet to start; such is our conditioning. But we have already entered Director Romeo Castellucci’s world, and so far, he’s gently telling us to shut our mouths and open our eyes and ears.

The filmic vignette gives way to a nightmarish scene of power and pain. A large turbine spins with violence and anger. The certain knowledge that the heads of hair that descends from above will catch in the rotating mechanism and the accompanying dread-inducing sound effect makes for frightening viewing. The inevitability of the scene is part of its objectionable magnetism; Castellucci has slipped into our subconscious and he’s starting to make a...