By Cameron Woodhead
THEATRE
Because The Night ★★★
Belinda McClory in Malthouse Theatre’s immersive Because The Night.Credit: Pia Johnson
Enter this immersive theatre experience and you will discover a Malthouse transformed, to echo a line from The Tempest, into as strange a maze as ever anyone trod. Because The Night is an extraordinary triumph of design, and you could happily spend the whole time losing yourself in its atmospheric and sumptuously detailed labyrinth.
The audience dons capes and masks before being led inside where the performance commences. The work is an adaptation of Hamlet, refracted through the lens of supernatural soap, reframing the action as a sort of horror-tinged mystery with an eerie aesthetic that owes more to David Lynch than Stranger Things.
Artemis Ioannides and Keegan Joyce in the labyrinth of Because The Night.Credit: Pia Johnson
You’re free to follow the performers as they rove throughout a warren of more than 30 rooms. Or you can explore Elsinore, reimagined as a precarious realm where a desperate and decadent royal dynasty presides over a working-class logging town, where woodcutters foment secret rebellion, and even the forest plots its revenge against human usurpers.
The scale, and intricacy, of the theatre maze exceeds anything attempted by Australian artists. The quality of the mise-en-scene is at least equal to Teatro de los Sentidos’ The Echo of The Shadow, which amazed theatregoers at the Melbourne Festival in 2016, and a cut above the popular Edgar Allan Poe-themed performance maze A Midnight Visit, which sold out for months in 2019. Dale Ferguson’s architecture and Marg Horwell’s interior design combine to disorient and amuse, beguile and disturb. Much of the world-building depends on the supreme ambition of their visual imagination, and the toil and technical expertise required to imbue that vision with a totalising sense of reality.
Together they have constructed a jungle of rooms and passages to reward the curious, with an abundance of secrets – like Easter eggs in a computer game – and clues to Elsinore’s mystery strewn throughout. Committed seekers might find a hidden pig museum, an enchanted forest, backroom cocktail bars, or a retro arcade where you can bash out a game of Galaga if the performance isn’t grabbing you.
As it may well not. The writing gives little sign of knowing why Hamlet was chosen beyond brand recognition.
Maria Theodorakis performs in Because The Night. Credit: Pia Johnson
Audiences familiar with the play will be disappointed if they hoped to gain fresh insights. And you feel sorry for a talented cast who seem trapped in a version that poaches Shakespeare’s plot points, replaces his poetry with risible cliche, and tinkers so superficially with the work that, for the most part, it comes across as dumbed-down soap opera with the angst dialled up to 11.
The performance does have the virtue of remaining coherent even if you miss parts of it (which, with several scenes often running concurrently in different rooms, you will). And the chilling denouement in a sawmill, augmented by Kat Chan’s costume, Amelia Lever Davidson’s lighting and David Franzke’s sound, gives the sense of bearing witness to a film produced live.
It’s one of the rare moments where script and performance aren’t overshadowed by the magisterial achievement of the design. But then, the maze alone is worth the price of the ticket.
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