Adelaide Festival 2020 review: Enter Achilles
If the bulk of Enter Achilles is beer and bullying, and plenty of laughs, there are some wonderfully tender moments. An opening tableau set up high is beautiful, yet implicitly brutal.
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Enter Achilles
FESTIVAL – Dance
UK
Dunstan Playhouse
March 14-15
Way back in 1996, Lloyd Newson’s DV8 Physical Theatre stunned Adelaide Festival audiences with Enter Achilles, an insightful, often brutal look at blokeyness and pub culture.
His restaging with the celebrated Rambert company, making its Australian premiere on the same Playhouse stage 24 years later, has lost none of its power.
It’s all pubs and darts for the most part, men at their testosterone-charged worst exposed as the truly frightening creatures they can be. A few too many pints, and anything’s possible.
A game of tag gets out of control. A practical joke goes very wrong. An accidental black eye might result, which is all good fun, but what about the elegant, effete man who wanders into the bar, sipping a glass of wine?
Before you know it, the violence becomes very real indeed. All of this is choreographed with the utmost finesse – even a swaggering walk takes on a beauty all its own.
If the bulk of Enter Achilles is beer and bullying, and plenty of laughs, there are some wonderfully tender moments. An opening tableau set up high is beautiful, yet implicitly brutal.
The bizarre love of one of the men for a blow-up doll – so much easier than reality, it might be supposed – is depicted in a gentle, lyrical manner, while the gay bashing is turned on its head when the dancer, clad in a Superman costume, rises above the slavering hordes.
The set, an ingenious creation by Ian MacNeil, is part pub, part hall of mirrors. It’s a winning design.
Enter Achilles struck a chord back in 1996 and still packs a mighty punch in 2020.