La Calisto

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1987

Cavalli, Francesco (libretto by Giovanni Faustini), Maureen McCarthy adapt Noelle Janacewska

A Baroque opera first performed in Venice in 1851 and a witty and masterful comedy based on two famous Greek myths - the seduction of Calisto by Jupiter, and the romance between Diana and Endymion. The two myths are combined through the music of Cavalli and the poetry of Faustini to form a satire on the hypocrisy and lechery of the god and the world they supposedly control - lust, deception and cruelty. Programme notes describe performance as "baroque lechery meets Edwardian concupiscence in Jupiter's maze". Kosky "transposed the 17th century opera into an Edwardian thriller/comedy/drama" (Romney review cited below). This was a four-piece ensemble with a Fellini-esque style set in an Edwardian environment. Diana and her virgins returning from the hunt become schoolgirls at tennis, Pan as a D.H. Lawrence stable-master, satyrs as school-boys. This was the Australian premiere of the opera. The set included an English garden maze. The actors cross-dressed. Kosky: "We wrench the audience into a once-off cosmic experience...this very funny, frivolous and luxurious dabble with the gods, with all its ethereal splendour, is violently pared back. We want to leave audiences with a very strong sense of the tragic human dimension." Interviewer: "'La Calisto' is said to combine the sweeping cosmic scope of '2001: A Space Odyssey' with the steamy sexuality of a Fellini flick."

Barrie Kosky

Michael Anderson

Shauna Beesley (Calisto), Emma O'Brien (Glunone), Andrew Muscat-Clark (Diana), Jo Cohen, Naomi Hornstein, Bruce Macrae (keyboard player).

Plays, 1980s, 1987