Black Rider, Tom Waits and William S Burroughs' trippy musical take on a quintessentially dark slice of German folklore, is an anarchic melting pot of musical genres and wild, stylised theatre. So, it comes as little surprise that for Malthouse Theatre and Victorian Opera's new co-production, part of the Melbourne Festival, director Matthew Lutton has assembled a suitably wild cast. Featuring some of the most fearless creative polymaths from Australia and beyond, among the ranks of this vaudevillian super-group are opera stars turned cabaret divas, Kanen Breen and Jacqueline Dark of Strange Bedfellows, Australia's most gloriously irreverent chanteuse, Meow Meow, arguably our grandest doyen of queer storytelling, Paul Capsis, and British bearded lady, Le Gateau Chocolat.
So many audacious personalities cramming one stage should surely overwhelm a piece of theatre, but Waits and Burroughs' pitch-black fable thrums with such shapeshifting originality, such a vivid and irrepressible spirit, that it requires nothing but the most deliciously lurid performances to truly soar. What's more, there's a surprising twinkle in the eye of this show. It may well defy all conventional means of categorisation, straddling opera, musical theatre and subversive dramatic pastiche, but its central premise is uncannily common, echoed throughout European folk traditions: a deal with the devil.
Modelled after the tale of Der Freischutz, this particular demonic bargain is made for love, or rather a test of romantic mettle. To prove his worth as a suitor, a man must demonstrate his skill at shooting. Forged in the guts of hell, a set of magic bullets should transform him from lame shot to sharpshooter, but as is always the case when the devil's owed a favour, happy endings are rarely ever after.
If the aforementioned hero's fate sounds a little predictable, there's a very good reason. The devil's pact is a narrative trope that has its origins in stories dating back to our earliest documented societies. Over the centuries, it has been reimagined, spruced-up, dumbed-down, and transplanted into virtually every human culture. Even the greatest bastions of Western literature, from Marlowe to Goethe, Chekhov to Wilde, Bulgakov to Twain, have dredged-up new takes on this satanic storyline from the inky depths of its ages-old heritage. "I think there's always been a nagging sense that mankind is drawn to doing destructive things," Matthew Lutton says of the prolific number of devil-deals in the canon of Western storytelling. "It's this idea that desire overwhelms our conscience - we inevitably want to do things that are bad for us rather than things that are good. Excess, addiction, gluttony, wealth, are all traditionally seen as sinful, so any quest to acquire more of anything - money, success, power, love - has often been aligned with evil forces."
The cultural familiarity of Black Rider's plot is echoed in Waits' music. The parallels are drawn thick and heavy through a mercurial mix of everyday musical styles, aping at well-known genres, but with an unmistakable undercurrent of rugged, ragged, raging Waits-brand individuality. "What Waits does remarkably well is writing songs that create the illusion of simplicity," Lutton observes. "The style or the emotional timbre of a song might be seemingly straightforward, but under the surface, it's full of contradictions and small musical references that transform the meaning. It's one of those great things where a show can be very popular because it sounds very simple and very accessible on face value, but as you hear more of it, as you experience it further, you realise that it's knowingly full of misdirection. And that's what makes it so rich."
In fact, this shifting musical vernacular is as vital to communicating the central essence of the story as any lyric or spoken dialogue. As Waits winds his way through a woozy catalogue of musical archetypes, his choice of genres draw in other subliminal threads. Kit Kat Klub-esque cabaret ditties, rock-infused blues ballads, garish intoxicated shanties, and wide-eyed, crazed Viennese waltzes; Waits' cherry-picked styles all make subtle het sophisticated connections to various hedonistic subcultures, as if to amplify the notion of compromised Christian morality. "The music borders on madness at times. There're so many musical ideas going on from so many cultures. But it all somehow works. It's a real smorgasbord of eclectic styles but nothing feels out of place," Lutton insists. "It's a brilliant piece for anyone who's never come to an opera before, because in many ways it's not an opera at all. It's jagged and surprising and fragmentary. It's like a jazz cabaret disguised as an opera."
Black Rider was last seen in Australia in 2005, when maverick auteur Robert Wilson, who was involved in the creation of the work, brought his 1990 staging to the Sydney Festival. That production wore its Germanic heart on its sleeve, with a production that at once evoked the boxy woodcut prints of Deutsche folk art, the gothic, kinky camp of the Weimar Republic, the stylised rigour of Brecht and Weill, and the severe and inscrutable experimentalism of the 20th-century avant-garde. With such a definitive and complex account already established, Lutton has brought all the available resources to bear on his new production. The artists in his cast are not just mere performers, but also theatre and cabaret makers in their own right. Lutton says their input has been invaluable.
"This show is made for a collaborative approach. It has almost been written to invite a carnival of performers to sit down with the score and allocate its parts to the personalities in the room. And with this cast, that process has been truly extraordinary. Having a room of people that understand the style, that understand the insanity of this type of production, means we have been able to be ambitious. It's turned out to be a very playful creative process. Everyone is willing to invent. Everyone is willing to create and throw their ideas in and fire things out and be extreme. So much of the show has been created through this kind of collaboration that it's found a really unexpected quality."
For the finished production, Lutton and his cohort of co-conspirators have embraced Black Rider's dark heart, while preserving the mischevious, unruly chutzpah of Waits' kaleidoscopic score and Burroughs' beat poetry. "We've created a world where, as we descend deeper and deeper into madness, it becomes more and more honest. It's almost a disintegration of style throughout the show," Lutton explains. "It's set in a space that's full of old, low-fi tech, trap doors and wires. At the start, we're introduced to each character, and then we watch them as if they're in a pinball machine. It's like the product of the overactive imagination of a child; it's a devil's playground, except that this playground is actually made to kill people."
Malthouse Theatre and Victorian Opera present Black Rider: The Casting Of Magic Bullets, at Malthouse Theatre till 8 Oct, part of the Melbourne Festival.
