Ancient meets modern(ist) in Le Peplum

Ancient meets modern(ist) in Le Peplum by Royal de Luxe (1993)

Bigger than Ben-Hur? Maybe not. But funnier, for sure. Starting with a burning theatre curtain and ending with a piano being catapulted into the air, French street-theatre company Royal de Luxe's Le Peplum condensed three thousand years of storytelling into a wild outdoor spectacle that turned the tropes of Hollywood's biblical epics on their heads.

Performed to an audience arranged on the Sydney Opera House steps, it told the story of rivals for the crown of Ancient Egypt in a series of mock-serious scenes and oversized sight gags involving giant pieces of stage machinery – technology that laid the ground for the creation of the company's globe-trotting parades of giant marionettes in later years.