Sydney Festival Digital Archive

The Black Rider by William S. Burroughs and Robert Wilson (2005)

The dark heart of the 2005 Sydney Festival was without doubt The Black Rider. Staged by the late Robert Wilson with music by Tom Waits and text by William S. Burroughs, it spun a Germanic folk tale of doomed love into a sardonic allegory of addiction – with the devil’s bullets (provided by the satanic Peg Leg) as the fix.

The staging was a sideshow fever dream with characters entering via a tall black trunk; the music was deliciously feral-sounding. Though we missed out on Marianne Faithfull as Peg (she withdrew from the production due to ill health; understudy Nigel Richards stepped in), this darkly magical show made the invitation to “Lay down in the web of the black spider” into something you might even consider.