Dive Deeper: Night Night
Since launching in 2013, The Last Great Hunt has carved out a distinctive space in the Australian theatre landscape, with a bold commitment to making new work. Over the past decade, they’ve created 37 new works, presented over 100 seasons, and racked up more than 2000 performances. Now they are bringing their work Night Night to Darwin Festival, a production that explores themes of life, death, and other dimensions, centred around a scientist’s quest in Antarctica.
Meet the Hunters
The Last Great Hunt is a Perth-based, artist-led collective of five theatre makers – Gita Bezard, Adriane Daff, Jeffrey Jay Fowler, Arielle Gray, and Tim Watts – who are driven by a shared passion for inventive, emotionally resonant storytelling. True to their name, they are Hunters: relentlessly pursuing ideas, images, and moments with the intent to capture and shape them into bold theatrical experiences. Working collaboratively and non-hierarchically, they create original work that is diverse in form and united by craft, curiosity, and imagination.
Collaboration is key
The Last Great Hunt’s creative process is rooted in deep collaboration, where responsibility lies with those making the work, and ego is left at the door. Night Night is an example of this: originally sparked as a digital collaboration between artists in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, it evolved over years into a layered live production, co-created by Tim Watts and Arielle Gray with Trick of the Light Theatre. From storyboarding and rehearsals to building props, creating sound assets, animating, and programming QLab, everyone chips in, there are no fixed roles or lanes. Luke might be focusing lights, someone else might find the perfect wind sound effect for Claudio’s score, or contribute a visual element for Tim to animate. The result is a work where ideas are shaped collectively that no one person can take credit for. It’s a process that can only come from genuine trust, openness, and shared vision.
Live cinema, onstage
Night Night is a cinematic theatre experience where every frame is created live before your eyes. Combining puppetry, animation, DIY effects, and live filmmaking, the show reveals both the story and the mechanics behind it, inviting the audience to witness the film as it’s made. From shadowy illusions to layered animations and a glowing wire puppet named ‘Sticky,’ the performers build the film in real time, blending technical precision with playful invention. The result is a strange, funny, and deeply human adventure that’s as much about how it’s told as what it tells.
Night Night – Book Now
Wed 13 – Sat 16 Aug
Brown’s Mart Theatre
Written for Darwin Festival by Alyson Evans
