TESTING THE LIMITS OF THEATRE TAKES EDGE OFF THE HEAT
Author: ANGELA BENNIE
Date: 10/01/1994
Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
 
WITH bushfires on the horizon, the scent of disaster in the air, festival goers took their seats on Thursday night before a 
newly formed theatre company with the ominous name of Burning House. 

Its debut was made in an old sandstone church in Darlinghurst: the heat was intense, unrelenting and stifling, and heads 
were woolly with fatigue. 

Yet, if there were such a thing as a collective, singular thought that night, then it was not "the heat | the heat" | but 
something more like "at last | at last" | 

At last, here is a theatre company making theatre. At last, here is a theatre company using theatre's vocabulary to tell 
its story; at last, a theatre company testing theatre's limits, not for so-called "experimental"reasons, as so often is 
loudly proclaimed to be the case, but so that it might reach out further into its audience, to communicate as deeply and 
richly as possible what it might have to say. 

At last, here is a theatre company with the courage and humility and adventurousness to scavenge where it will for its 
ideas, images, methods, style - it is possible to find here in this production's topology ideas drawn from Grotowski to 
Jacques Lecoq, from the Theatre de Complicite to Brecht to Bergman, from a first-year NIDA acting workshop to a highly 
stylised Sydney Theatre Company politic - all so that it might tell its story better, so that it might bring to life all the 
story's hidden nuances, layers, patterns and poetry for our sake, the audience. And out of such scavenging, it is possible 
to glimpse a rough and very raw hybrid being born, one with the potential of having a marvellous, distinctive life of its 
own. 

The program states that That Eye, The Sky, an adaptation of Tim Winton's novel about a young boy growing up in Subiaco, 
Western Australia, is a collective effort by the company. 

Nevertheless, it has to be said that this production is an exceptional directorial debut for Richard Roxburgh. The work 
as a whole has a singular life with a singular vision. There is a discernible discipline and structure binding all its 
disparate parts together, whether it be through its soundscape, or its imagery or its action. 

What is particularly striking of Roxburgh's direction is that though it is muscular and tough, paradoxically it allows 
all that is most tender and fragile in That Eye, The Sky to reveal itself, sometimes shyly, sometimes with splendour. 
And being a rite-of-passage story, there is much that is tender and fragile in That Eye, The Sky, as young Ort (David Wenham) 
journeys from childhood into adolescence, where the world's strangeness and ineffableness are experienced as hostile and 
inexplicable, and as transcending and glorious 

Roxburgh's production rises to the challenge in a multitude of eclectic ways, such as using chairs as windows, or pulleys 
as stairs, or sudden switches of mood and tension to startle or unsettle, or to soothe and comfort. Actors are bunched to 
form a collective "body" when the emotion is communal, or split apart, when emotions are in conflict. It is a production 
that entrances with its sophistication, yet entrances with its roughness and rawness. 

It is pointless to mark out individual performances: it would be like pulling the wings off a butterfly all the better to
admire their individual patterns and shapes. Sufficient to say that, despite the fires raging around us, despite the heat 
and the fug that night, here is one person very glad to have seen this House burning.