The Sunday Telegraph 16/1/05

Devil of a good show

What's the Black Rider about? squawked some aggrieved guests on the opening night of the Sydney Festival's big ticket theatre show.

It's a version of the traditional tale of making pacts with the devil- do so at your peril. But that's not even half of it.

Staged with simplicity and choreographed within an inch of its life by Robert Wilson, text by William S Burroughs with music and lyrics by Tom Waits, The Black Rider is spectacular theatre and an ideal festival opener. Much as Ariane Mnouchkine's Flood Drummers did three years ago, the production caused argument on opening night between those who loved it and those who hated it.

However, from the loved it corner: its exciting, provoking, imaginative and demanding in a way that so little domestic theatre currently is.

Robert Wilson is one of modern theatre's great botherers. His vision is total (he directs, lights and designs, with costumes by Frida Parmeggiani) and his brilliant cast is part of that vision: great faces, idiosynchratic characterisation and intensity.

Nigel Richards is first among equals in a dazzling ensemble of singer-actors.

Richards is as androgynously beautiful, seductive, handsome, beguiling, tragic and humorous as only the devil could and should be.

Suddenly Hell seems like a good option.

The Daily Telegraph 11/1/05 Michael Bodey

The Devil's Advocate

Robert Wilson's collaboration with Tom Waits and William S Burroughs was always going to be unconventional but this production works as a wonderful opening night polariser.
In many respects more accessible and humorous than the esoteric Wilson's other works, The Black Rider is an energetic, approachable and inventive piece.

Based on as old German fable which was transformed into Carl Maria von Weber's opera, Der Freischutz, The Black Rider is as simple a tale as they come. A young clerk, Wilhelm (Matt McGrath), is deprived of marrying his young love, Katchen (Mary Margaret O'Hara) because her father wants her to marry a hunter.

Wilhelm makes a Faustian pact with the devil, Pegleg (Nigel Richards), who supplies him with the magic bullets that will fulfil his destiny and prove his downfall. Despite its narrative simplicity, a little background research on Burroughs (he accidentally shot his wife) and other aspects of the production helps.

The Black Rider's surface is brash yet mannered, probably not to all tastes but easy enough to indulge. Wilson's staging and lighting are endlessly inventive without being showy. His scene composition is often wonderful.

The real stars are on stage and in the pit. It's hard to imagine Faithfull would be a better Pegleg than Richards, while O'Hara is wonderful and Jack Willis as Duke, captivating.

And the Magic Bullets, the eight-piece orchestra, should be highly commended for its vibrant playing of Waits' forever playful and entertaining score. As with the entire production, The Black Rider is all about performance rather than substance.

The Australian 11/1/05 Deborah Jones

Dark forces combine to reinterpret romantic tale

The Black Rider is an almost sacred text of 19th-century German high Romanticism, here interpreted by the unholy trinity of William S Burroughs, Robert Wilson and Tom Waits: the work of the beat-poet ex-junkie, the high priest of cool and composer laureate to the marginalised, together on one stage.

It's hard to think of a collaboration more fraught with snob-theatre potential than this, but The Black Rider is a blast- a heady mix of cabaret, circus, music hall and popular song set against the angles and planes of Wilson's startlingly beautiful German expressionist designs. Wilson's work can seem remote and academic; here it is warmed by Burroughs's sardonic humour and Waits's eclectic and highly approachable score that speaks to the heart.

Waits's brand of romance might be seen though the bottom of a cracked shot glass, but it is romance nonetheless. In it's essentials The Black Rider is yet another version of the Faustian bargain, refracted through the 1821 Carl Maria von Weber opera Der Freischutz (The Freeshooter). The well-prepared theatregoer might like to bone up on the German fable as something as straightforward narrative isn't a priority in The Black Rider. But let's just say that when the devil gives the gormless youth a handful of magic bullets, the matter is likely to end in tears.

It helps to know that apart from being a world-class drug addict, Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife in 1951, and the fable is enlivened by his mordent world view. In a tour de force monologue involving four different characters, delivered by the imposing Jack Willis, Burroughs offers an explanation of why his version of the Freeshooter, unlike the traditional one, doesn't have a happy ending.

As the characters troop off to the madhouse, however, the audience is likely to discover it's had the happiest of times, and that the greatest pleasures have come from the bravura performers, the individual songs and the aesthetics; from the means of performance rather than from any deep revelations in the text.

The actors are, one and all, superb. A particular joy is Nigel Richards, replacing the ill Marianne Faithfull. He is the magnetic centre of The Black Rider, which gets a huge amount of its energy from his sly wit and something-for-everyone sexual charisma. The eight-member band, The Magic Bullets, playing a staggering variety of instruments (musical saw, toy piano, ondes Martinot, didgeridoo, pocket trumpet and all the usual suspects), is worth a show of its own.

The Australian 11/1/05 Festival Round Up

...At its opening on Saturday, The Black Rider played to a full house, slightly subdued during the long (90 minute) first half, but brought to a foot stomping ovation in the end...

The Sun Herald 16/1/05 Colin Rose

The devil has all the best tunes

After several years of planning, Sydney Festival director Brett Sheahy has, in his final program, realised his ambition to present a production by the great American theatre auteur Robert Wilson.

In bringing plays by Wilson and, two years ago, the equally great Ariane Mnouchkine (of Theatre du Soleil) to Sydney, Sheehy has made a deliberate effort to plug some of the gaps in the city's collective knowledge of the best of the avant-garde.

The Black Rider is, in fact, the work of three iconoclastic Americans: Wilson directs as well as designing the set and lighting, William Burroughs (beat novelist and author of Naked Lunch) wrote the text and the gravel voiced singer Tom Waits wrote the music and lyrics.
All of them have been inspired by German sources. For Wilson it is the expressionist art and films of the 1920s and 1930s. Burroughs has brought his mordent sense of humour to bear on Der Freishcutz (The Freeshooter), a centuries old Faustian fable. And Waits's music, oscillating between the crazed and starkly beautiful ( like the play itself), is a descendant of the collaboration between Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill.

All of this is filtered through the sensibilities of the Americans, who contribute allusions to the Universal Pictures horror movies such as Bela Lugosi's Dracula, sideshows, burlesques and drug abuse ( the sucker makes his no-win deal with the devil, the junkie with his pusher).

The result, performed with the director's trademark stylised movement and speech, is bewitchingly weird and more camp and playful than it is unnerving.

The Black Rider makes more sense metaphorically than it does literally, particularly when you remember that Burroughs shot and killed his wife (in an ill-fated game of William Tell), and that he was a legendary abuser of narcotics.

The performances are superb: agile, highly focused, wonderfully grotesque. Wilhelm (Matt McGrath), a pen-pushing clerk, must learn to hunt and shoot if he is to impress the father of Katchen (Mary Margaret O'Hara, and extraordinary singer), the woman he loves. Pegleg (Nigel Richards, saucy and androgynous), the devil, offers Wilhelm bullets that cant fail to hit their targets. But at what cost?

An eight piece band wallops Waits's clanking, wheezing and occasionally ethereal music with great gusto.

The play finishes with the quintessential example of Wilson's stagecraft, the scenery and actors all disappearing into a small cupboard that then slowly rises into the air. Magic.