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Legends (of the Golden Arches) (★★★★) and The Wrong Gods (★★★)

Theatre of tension at Melbourne’s RISING festival
RISING Festival
by
ABR Arts 12 June 2025

Legends (of the Golden Arches) (★★★★) and The Wrong Gods (★★★)

Theatre of tension at Melbourne’s RISING festival
RISING Festival
by
ABR Arts 12 June 2025
Merlynn Tong and Joe Paradise Lui in Legends (of The Golden Arches) (photograph by Jessica Wyld)

Now in its fifth year, Melbourne’s RISING has entrenched itself in Australia’s festival calendar. Emerging from the ashes of the Melbourne Festival and White Night, it has survived two Covid-19-aborted iterations to become, alongside Sydney’s Vivid and Hobart’s Dark Mofo, a key midwinter arts and culture assembly. It is possible to think, as you gaze up at Flinders Street Station, its yellow façade and green copper dome bathed in that distinctive shade of icy blue, that the festival has come of age. Yet, I’m not sure that founders and co-artistic directors Hannah Fox and Gideon Obarzanek have quelled the sense that RISING remains something of a Frankenstein’s monster, neither its identity nor its purpose fully intelligible.

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