Up here in Queensland, Circa’s newest production known as Il Ritorno will be headed to The Arts Centre Gold Coast on August 26-27 and the Brisbane Powerhouse from September 9-12. Theatre-lovers in Victoria will be able to catch this production before their “Sunshine State” counterparts, with the show to be performed across four days at the Arts Centre Melbourne Powerhouse from August 17-20.
Over 75 taut minutes, this production retells Claudio Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno D’Ulisse in Patria, intermingling it with folk songs and new compositions and percolating it through the lens of Primo Levi’s post WW2 European displacement.
The stage is awash with bodies tumbling, lifting and clutching. Then, out of the darkness and gnawed by nostalgia, the Greek hero Ulysses appears after 20 long years of war and wanderings. Will he reach his faithful wife Penelope before she succumbs to her suitors? Il Ritorno D’Ulisse in Patria is taken from the second half of Homer’s Odyssey, and tells how constancy and virtue are ultimately rewarded, treachery and deception overcome. At the core of Il Ritorno is the hunger to return home – saturated with loss and war, powered by longing and haunted by the past.
Il Ritorno has been created by Yaron Lifschitz, in collaboration with composer and arranger Quincy Grant. It will be performed by a cast of singers and accompanists, who will be joined by the ensemble of Brisbane’s Circa.
Yaron Lifschitz | Creator of Il Ritorno by Circa
Sometimes, as they say in the movies, ‘this one is personal’. That is how I feel about Il Ritorno.
It is personal because Primo Levi’s account of returning from the innermost circle of hell that was Auschwitz only to end up in the vast expanse of the Russian steppe was tinged with the same crushing nostalgia, post-traumatic memory and cold hope that I heard beating at the heart of Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno D’Ulisse in Patria.
“It is only through good fortune and the caprices of history that my family ended in the sun of Australia rather than the fires of that evil and it is beholden on us to tell of it.
When we challenge ourselves, when we make it personal, when we try to communicate difficult, inexpressible things and when we share them, raw, vulnerable and without the safety net of convention ….we have continued to help a little to keep culture alive – culture which may be our only defence.
Il Ritorno will be performed n the Arts Centre Melbourne’s Playhouse from August 17-20. Tickets are priced from $35.00 – $59.00 depending on seating preference, although there are supposedly concession/youth/artist card prices available as well. Tickets can be booked by calling the Arts Centre Melbourne Box Office (Phone / In-Person) or through their website.
