Paths and Lanes into a city’s past

SMH, September 20 2013

Reviewer – Jason Blake

This multi-venue promenade performance developed by the Australian Theatre for Young People, with Sydney Living Museums and the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority, shows some of the city’s familiar historical sites in a new light.

After picking up a map in the temporary box office at 140 George Street, the audience is sorted into groups and dispatched in different directions through the lanes and back alleys of The Rocks.  On the top floor of the Rocks Discovery Museum in Kendall Lane, there’s a welcome to country and multimedia-supported solo dance performance. On the way out we are set upon by Victorian street urchins, though on this occasion they seem more interested in belting each other around than angling for the silver in our pockets.

In the evening’s most successful performances, we are ushered in to the sheltered world of two young colonial women of impeccable family and limited social opportunities and a ghostly tribe of whispering children sing the restored house at 36 Cumberland Street to spooky life. Elsewhere, the cramped rooms of the Susannah Place Museum become an immersive exercise in time travel.

Meanwhile, in a cheerless conference room near The Rocks YHA, the calendar rolls forward to more recent times in an attempt to sell us the future of the area as envisaged by Lend Lease in 1963. The architect’s model makes it clear that every laneway and building experienced to this point will have to be razed. But that’s progress, right?  The episodes on offer vary widely in their dramatic sophistication and impact but the novelty of the experience and the ambience of The Rocks’ crooked pathways make the journey an intriguing one – especially for kids, who will find themselves face to face with performers their own age relating the childhood experiences of another century.