Sydney Town Hall, January 9
7.5/10
Dark Noon unravels the American Dream thread by thread, until all that’s left is a grinning nightmare. Winning the West is stripped down to a tawdry tale of guns, gold, whores, booze, genocide, railroads and God. Intermingled with a tale of whites behaving badly in carving up North America are references to their behaviour in colonising and oppressing South Africans.

Some will purse their lips and mutter about black-armband views of history. But Dark Noon is merely ripping the romance out of white heroes with guns, emphasised by being performed by South Africans, most of whom are black, provocatively donning absurd blond wigs and crudely powdering their faces.
Collectively devised, and then written by the Danish director Tue Biering, and choreographed and co-directed by Nhlanhla Mahlangu, it begins with a bare stage and big screen. Much of the action is shot live, cine-theatre-style, and the screen gradually becomes our primary focus as a town is built, wall-frame by wall-frame, obscuring parts of the stage. Saloon, brothel, church, diner, shop, bank, jail and reservation all spring up, a railroad slicing through their midst. Tropes of cowboy films are satirised; parallels with life in Johannesburg’s Apartheid townships emphasised.

Dark Noon is hardly the first attempt at demythologising the West. The most notable US success was the exceptionally gritty and poetic TV series, Deadwood. But Dark Noon has a different purpose. It uses the West as a metaphor for investigating wider matters of land theft and the very nature of story-telling. Every tale is told from a perspective, of course, and Dark Noon spins that perspective around, and tells a very white story through black eyes, with images, tableaux and song as vital as the words, which mostly come in the form of narration rather than dialogue.
“It was a time when white lives didn’t matter,” we’re told at the outset, before it goes on to prove it really was a time when no lives mattered. In the incessantly violent westward migration lay the roots of obsessions with guns, heroes, land, race, the ruthless garnering of wealth and the nation’s narcissistic sense of its own greatness. The show unfolds in titled chapters, and the fourth, Gold, Gold, Gold, is as manic a piece of theatre as you’ll see.
Yet, for all the unbounded energy of the show’s eight performers, all playing multiple roles (with some help from audience members), and the profundity of what it’s trying to say, Dark Noon can also lose dramaturgical clarity, and thereby momentum. Utterly compelling to begin, the spell is lost intermittently, to come back with savage intensity at the end, when the actors tell of their own relationships with Westerns while growing up. The importance of perspective is encapsulated when one says, “If you want to kill an African story, tell it in English.” In those terms, the Western probably just got the treatment it deserved.
Until January 23.