“Writer Piers Beckley artfully condenses the source material to create a lively story that plays out in a mix of poetry, prose and song. The icing on the cake however is Ray Shell’s boisterous direction, which remains sympathetic to the spirit of the Gilgamesh legend while using various theatrical devices to shape the narrative.”
“It is a story full of detail and symbolic meaning of which Beckley offers the dramatic highlights, fights, steamy sex, ritual and exotic images and it is told is poetic and heightened language that makes it easy to mix the hieratic and the natural. […] Beckley, Shell and the company demonstrate that it doesn’t depend on scale to deliver an epic—and this is one that is full of dramatic surprises.”
“It seems like an almost impossible task to reduce twelve long stories into just one hour, but somehow Piers Beckley has managed it and it makes a stunning play. […] These people and the talented cast all work hard to make a high class imaginative production.”
“So, let’s set the scene. Welcome to Uruk, a barbaric city whose king – Luke Trebilcock’s rangily charismatic Gilgamesh- is the living law of instant life and death, endlessly entitled to cursory rape 24-7. Instantly, we’re immersed in a set of brilliantly sparse, sepia backdrops eerily reminiscent of a prehistoric spin on Edvard Munch’s iconic Scream painting, strikingly stalked by women worthy of Wonder Woman’s bloodthirsty Amazons. Like everything else here – set, acting and costumes – the language is as bluntly, pleasingly effective as a smack in a prissy, unsuspecting sycophant’s face. Tough, compressed and uncompromising, Piers Beckley’s script is pure bullet-points to Ray Shell’s machine-gun direction, a seamless montage of scenes bursting with self-contained power.”
Tickets are still available for the final performances this week.