After taking the reins in 2025, this year’s Perth Festival was a chance for artistic director Anna Reece to consolidate the ideas she set in motion last year.
The festival continues to break out of conventional performances spaces, hosting operas in an Ikea store and an abandoned office space (Secret Opera and The Trial), taking on the CBD with street-based adventure and dance (the booster protocol and Perth Moves), and a sculptural fire trail along the Swan River (Karla Bidi).
Two of the stand-out favourite venues from last year returned: the Embassy Ballroom at Perth Town Hall, and the East Perth Power Station.
The Embassy Ballroom, which hosted a series of jazz, cabaret, soul and contemporary music in a venue that took visitors back to a golden age of live music, is a recreation of a Perth dance hall that closed in 1982.
The still-derelict East Perth Power Station paired the ticketed main stage inside with the free performances of Casa Musica in the outer gardens by the Swan River.
In a packed three-week program, we couldn’t come close to seeing everything, but here are six of our highlights (and if you have a touch of FOMO, while the main Perth Festival program has ended, the film festival and art program continues until March and April).
The Tiger Lillies
Described variously as avant-garde, Brechtian cabaret, death oompah and operatic punk, a night with The Tiger Lillies is never a dull experience.
And so it proved at the Embassy Ballroom, where the UK trio wowed a packed crowd with their melancholic and darkly funny show featuring songs inspired by the seedy streets of London’s Soho in the 1980s.
Cult cabaret trio The Tiger Lillies were nominated for a Grammy for their 2003 album The Gorey End. (Supplied: Perth Festival)
Stories of sex workers, gin bars, drug overdoses and suicide are delivered by lead vocalist and showman extraordinaire Martyn Jacques in his degenerate and often mournful falsetto, combining pathos and hilarity in equal measure.
The trio are hugely talented musicians and their eclectic jumble of instruments includes accordion, a washboard, a theremin, ukulele, a grand piano and even a musical saw.
With their white grease-painted faces and blackened eyes, and dressed in three-piece suits with bowler hats, the Lillies’ distinctive steampunk aesthetic evokes echoes of dandyism and whimsy.
It shouldn’t work but somehow it does; a crazy, riot of an evening akin to witnessing a macabre music hall act play at a funeral wake led by your non-PC uncle singing tales of debauchery and death. Highly recommended.
— Andrea Mayes
Haribo Kimchi
This was the show that made me feel that after years of post-COVID struggles, Perth Festival was really back as an international arts event.
In the State Theatre’s Studio Underground, South Korea-born, Belgium-based performer and composer Jaha Koo open his pojangmacha (a typical South Korean street-snack stand) and tells his story of food, memory, the meaning of home, and being far from it.
Throughout the performance, Koo tells a series of personal stories as he cooks and serves food to two audience members who are invited on stage for the duration of the performance.
Jaha Koo serves up food as well as intimate and absurdist anecdotes in Haribo Kimchi. (Supplied: Perth Festival/Bea Borgers)
From the memories of his grandmother making kimchi in her South Korean village, a disastrous attempt to bring 12 kilograms of the ubiquitous pickled cabbage to Berlin when he first moved to Europe, and the sting of unbridled racism at a train station in the north-west Belgian city of Ghent, Koo tells his stories with great humour, and is assisted by music he’s composed for the show.
This is a story about dislocation, tradition, and how food can make us feel at home.
Koo’s incredible warmth and charm radiate on stage, culminating in him farewelling the crowd with an animatronic eel and sharing around glasses of chilled Korean beer.
— Emma Wynne
Ali Bodycoat & The Embassy Big Band
It’s surely the most glamorous night out you can have at the festival: reliving the golden age of dance music with local legend Ali Bodycoat and her full-sized, besuited big band, in one of the most beautiful venues Perth has to offer.
Ali Bodycoat at the Embassy Ballroom. (Supplied: Perth Festival/Aaron Claringbold)
One of the highlights of Anna Reece’s four-year vision for the Perth Festival was the creation of The Embassy at Perth Town Hall, a nostalgic nod to Perth’s famous Embassy Ballroom of the 1980s. Draped in curtains, dotted with cabaret tables and sparkling with lights, stepping in to the Town Hall is like taking a trip back in time — and that’s before the band even gets started.
And what a band this is. Boasting 18 of Perth’s finest musicians, and led by musical director Tom O’Halloran on the grand piano, The Embassy Big Band brings precision and passion to classic jazz and swing standards, with Ali Bodycoat’s effortless vocals (this is a woman who can belt out a Shirley Bassey number without breaking a sweat) soaring above it all.
The Perth Town Hall transformed into the Embassy Ballroom for the Perth Festival (Supplied: Perth Festival)
This show will be back at the festival again in 2027. Dust out that vintage outfit and make sure you bring your dancing shoes — you won’t be able to sit still.
— Claire Nichols
POV
Bub is a precocious 12-year-old who’s been given an expensive video camera for her birthday, which quickly becomes the bane of her parents’ lives.
Following them around the family home, camera in hand, she’s trying to make a film about her artist mum’s forthcoming ceramics exhibition, but her parents are proving less cooperative than she’d like.
They’re tired and stressed, and there’s something else too, which we don’t discover until the second half of this engrossing drama.
Bub’s mum, Penny, has bipolar disorder, and is struggling in the lead-up to her exhibition, as Bub tries to understand what’s happening.
POV turns storytelling on its head by using two different unrehearsed actors every night to play Bub’s parents. (Supplied: Perth Festival)
The parents are played by different actors each night, who are not given the script in advance, so the show unfolds in real time, as Bub tells them where to stand, when to speak and how to deliver their lines.
As Bub films them, her vision is projected onto a series of screens surrounding the stage — we are seeing family life literally through her eyes, and she is fully in charge of the action.
Yet we’re also made fully aware of the helplessness and bewilderment she feels in the face of her mum’s illness.
While the serious nature of the second half of the show was slightly jarring when juxtaposed with the light-hearted comedy evident earlier, POV is nonetheless a moving exploration of a family living with mental illness interpreted through the perspective of a child.
— Andrea Mayes
Ngaiire
Offered up as one of Casa Musica’s free events on the opening weekend, this was a great way to showcase the recently reclaimed open space at the East Perth Power Station.
Best know for her track Once, the Papua New Guinean-born future-soul artist commanded the stage with a mesmerising performance, despite her petite size and apparent shy nature.
Ngaiire and her musicians took over the Casa Musica stage with lush grooves and melodies. (Supplied: Perth Festival)
With the absence of a band member, Ngaiire was reduced from trio to duo, which limited her ability to perform some tracks like Diggin, despite requests from the front row.
Ngaiire took to the stage dressed in a flowing, multi-layered, olive green skirt (which she joked was threatening to fall off when a pin came undone on stage).
She’s got such a versatile voice and whilst she’s accomplished in her own right, the long list of artists she’s collaborated with is diverse and impressive.
My only disappointment would be that she deserved more publicity — I follow her as an artist on Spotify, which didn’t even flag her Perth Festival performance to fans.
I love a free gig but I would gladly have paid to see her, and I think she deserved to be a paid experience.
— Natalie Jones
Scenes from the Climate Era
Anyone who worries about the planet warming knows the feeling of fluctuating between hope, despair and wondering what the solutions are.
In this extraordinarily fast-paced play, which features 66 vignettes in just 80 minutes, the WA Youth Theatre Company took the audience into living rooms, community meetings, scientific labs and a future where it reaches 50C in the Perth suburbs.
David Finnigan’s play has had a few local touches and while it invites us to consider some truly scary scenarios (a mother frantically rushing her two toddlers to a cool shelter when the air-con breaks down during the brutal heat) it never lectures or invites despondency.
Members of the WA Youth Theatre Company breathe life into David Finnigan’s play, which explores the choices we make now and the impact they have on the future. (Supplied: Perth Festival)
The play wasn’t written specifically for young people but in the hands of the WA Youth Theatre Company (which has performers aged 13-26) it’s imbued with an incredible energy. The seven actors are not only brilliant in their many roles but their youth reinforces the urgency of tackling climate change for future generations, and why they are worth fighting for.
Above all, this is a play about hope; it’s impossible not to feel optimistic with young people like this coming though.
— Emma Wynne