Sydney Theatre, Walsh Bay (Part of the Sydney Festival)
January 8, 2015

Have you ever asked yourself “what did I just see?” It’s a question that has been repeating in my mind since leaving the Sydney Theatre yesterday evening after the opening night of the headline production of this year’s Sydney Festival, Tabac Rouge.

This is the fifth major show created by French circus maverick James Thierrée for his physical theatre troupe Compagnie du Hanneton, and by far one of his most ambitiously technical. With each new work Thierrée has been inching ever further away from the connotations of his circus background, and Tabac Rouge is the most choreographically dependent production of his oeuvre to date.

The universe of Tabac Rouge is a crumbling, dystopian junkyard, tinged with echoes of some long lost more civilised society. Ornate rococo lamps and the salvaged remains of neoclassical wooden furniture are starkly jumbled against huge tangles of cables, grimy industrial machinery, and the most dominating piece of set, a gigantic lattice of scaffolding, covered in worn and tarnished mirrors. This monolithic wall glides and spins around the stage, and becomes almost another character: an overlord, or vengeful idol that the dramatis personae worship, fear and...