The Pursuit of Youth: Adolescence, Seduction and the Pastoral in Act One of 'The Lost Echo'

Abstract

Act One of 'The Lost Echo' is a calculated exercise in seduction: an extravaganza that beguiles its audience with song, myth, slapstick, pantomime, opera, operetta, farce, dance, musical comedy, magic shows, drag and impersonation, to tell interwoven stories of debauchery so charmingly and so poignantly, that it is not until well after the performance is over that we might wonder whether we, like the victims of the gods, have been had, and whether, too, that is the point. In Act One, 'Spring'/'The Song of Phaeton', Barrie Kosky and Tom Wright exploit the appealing rhetoric of pastoral and youth in Ovid's original. Pastoral, a genre associated with the ideal of a simple - but hedonistic - life in wild but friendly nature, is designed to contrast favourably to the hustle-bustle of the metropole; in this Act, it serves as the background for the Act's main story, the tragic seduction of the nymph, Callisto, by Jove, the king of the gods. Youth is a key element in pastoral, invoking ideals of innocence, leisure and irresponsibility, as well as physical beauty and strength. In this Act, the youth of the younger actors in the Sydney Theatre Company's Actors' Company and the chorus of NIDA students, is on display, invoking the sense of pastoral, the sense of 'spring' – which serves as a title for the Act – and the aesthetic beauty that make youth seductive, but also vulnerable to predators.