The idea of the Wild West, the "frontier," is central to American identity. It’s been the canvas on which American history and culture have been written for 150 years – in art, literature, pulp fiction, and, most notably, film. Thanks to classic movies like Stagecoach, The Searchers and High Noon, almost everyone, everywhere has a notion of the Wild West.
But whose idea is it? Perhaps it takes an outsider’s perspective to see a myth for what it truly is.
Directed by Danish visionary Tue Biering and performed by a brilliant South African cast, Dark Noon will take over Sydney Town Hall, build a frontier town from scratch and turn your assumptions about the Wild West on their head.
From the dust, a skeletal set of familiar buildings will emerge — a church, a schoolhouse, a saloon, a jail. There, you’ll meet just some of the millions of migrants from around the world who chased the frontier in search of their dreams – of land, gold, God or a new life. You’ll encounter cowboys and gold seekers, gunslingers and missionaries, painted ladies and fortune hunters, those with nowhere else to go and those who had no choice but to follow where their masters led them.
As the town takes shape, so too does the audience’s role in it. If you like, you might find yourself recruited as a builder or sipping whiskey at the bar. You might listen to a church sermon or join a square dance. Or, just as quickly, you might find yourself herded into a barbed-wire pen or sold at a slave auction. One way or another, you’ll be part of a story bigger than the Wild West itself. 
“Dark Noon is really a multi-layered story,” says its writer and co-director Biering. “You can read historical European migration in it, you can read South African history in it and you can see some very basic human mechanisms at play – about survival, ambition and growth as the virus of human civilisation.”
Dark Noon is a powerful retort to the Churchillian notion that history is “written by the victors,” says co-director Nhlanhla Mahlangu. “Africans had their history written by Europeans, and we are inverting that idea. We’re showing you, ‘This is what it looks like when you write someone else’s history. Can you see how ridiculous it is?’ That’s why we are so absurd when we are inside the world of Dark Noon.” 
The latest in the Sydney Festival’s takeovers of Town Hall’s vast, history-steeped main space (perhaps you saw Sun & Sea there in 2023 or Counting and Cracking in 2019), Dark Noon is a genuinely immersive experience from fix+foxy, a company with a long history of challenging entrenched ideas. For example, in its radical version of the film Pretty Woman, performed in Copenhagen’s red-light district, real-life sex workers played Julia Roberts’ character on a set built from shipping containers. Fix+foxy’s version of the sitcom Friends featured a cast drawn from local asylum-seeker camps. In Welcome to Twin Peaks, a small-town psychiatrist, high school teacher and a former police investigator drove audience members through the winter darkness to meet townsfolk and hear their stories.
Expect Dark Noon to be as brutally funny and provocative as the world we’ve inherited—one built on foundations of colonial violence and exploitation — taking shape before your eyes.
Dark Noon
Dark Noon flips the script on the Wild West, envisioning US history as absurd, horrifying and deeply profound. A pioneer town springs up in real time as an extraordinary cast of South African actors reimagines the frontier through an outsider’s lens. With slapstick humour, satire and breathtaking stagecraft, this breakout hit of Edinburgh Fringe Festival and New York’s St. Ann’s Warehouse transforms Sydney Town Hall.
When: 9–23 January
Where: Sydney Town Hall