Based on the book by Kit Williams, Masquerade is Kate Mulvany’s tribute to the power of stories to bring joy and, specifically, comfort to the sick. Helen Dallimore plays a mother tending to her son, a permanent resident of the cancer ward.
She discovers Williams’ book, and the boy is enthralled by the adventures of Jack Hare, who is tasked by his mistress the Moon with telling the Sun of the Moon’s love for him. The Sun thinks he’s ugly, because everybody diverts his or her gaze from him. Jack sets off to deliver a jewel to the Sun, but loses it and returns disgraced. Instead of accepting this ending to the book, the boy and his mother enter Jack’s world and join forces with him to bring the Sun and the Moon together once and for all.
This is a show for kids with admirable darkness, in which the possibility of unhappy endings is admitted and narrative resolution is hard to come by. There’s a particularly flinty scene in which the sick boy howls, “Make it stop! Make it stop!” while his mother holds him down and a nurse administers an injection. But Jack Hare’s story – the thrust of the show – works less well.
Opening night to a show like this can be misleading: it’s a production full of panto elements, and this was a house in which the adults vastly outnumbered the children. But even still, several jokes simply don’t land, and the show never manages to key into that raucous, interactive rhythm of the best panto. It never builds up a head of steam – hobbled, strangely enough, by its ambition. It’s certainly bold to juggle the social realist with the fantastical, especially in a show for children, but tonally these worlds are so wildly far apart that jumping between them inevitably makes it hard to get too invested in either.
2.5/5 stars
Masquerade is playing at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House until Saturday January 17 as part of Sydney Festival.
