Night on Bald Mountain- Patrick White

We are not enthusiastic in engagement  with Patrick White.  I declined to finish his novel The Vivisector in 2012 as the story was unbearable. But since those with finer literary and dramatic tastes than ours have awarded him accolades we decided to include this rarely performed play (now in its 50th year) in our Malthouse theatre subscription .
This was a rewarding experience, from the creative mountain set and remarkable solo musical accompaniment for the script, to all of the the superbly attuned actors.

The story is not uplifting - the self-destruction of an alcoholic, the self-destruction of a naive and over-confidant young woman, the sad self-assessed inadequacy in old age of a writer manqué.

 
 Melita Jurisic -from Guardian photo

This was a worthwhile, if dark, experience of a tragedy. The critics mainly praise the performance by Melita Jurisic as the alcoholic and Peter Carroll as the intellectual. However I agree with one critic that the goat lady Julie Forsyth "is dream casting as Miss Quodling: she is at once a clown and a seer, a character in the tradition of Shakespeare’s Fools, and she compellingly unites the vulgar, the lyric and the tragic."

 Julie Forsyth- from Herald Sun

I thought Nikki Shiels as the young nurse deserved more of wrap than the reviewers seem to have given her.

 Nikki Shiels and Peter Carroll - from Malthouse