Sydney Festival show honours the lost children of Luna Park at Coney Island

For nearly 90 years, the rotating barrels of fun, giant slippery slides and magical mirror maze of Luna Park’s Coney Island have been an escape from reality in times of trouble for generations of Sydney children.

But when director Matthew Barclay lost his wife, dancer Johanna Puglisi, to cancer in 2019 at the age of 46, he began to think about not just the children they never got to have, but all the people who had passed through the amusement park and died at a young age, especially those conscripted to serve in a war.

Milania Hall, 11, Xavier Daher, 11, and Jordan Gedeon, 13, will perform in Night Song at Coney Island.

Barclay, the assistant director of Australian Opera’s recent Ring Cycle in Brisbane, sought comfort from his grief in the music of Gustav Mahler.

A few years back, he approached Sydney Festival director Olivia Ansell, a former dancer and friend of his wife, with an idea to create a “ceremony of innocence”, combining choral singers, classical music and innocent children having the time of their life at Coney Island.

“I knew Olivia was really wanting to do something on the history of Sydney’s Luna Park and its place in our city’s cultural story,” he said.

Director Matthew Barclay with members of the young ensemble performing at his show Night Songs.

He had initially thought of basing the story on the 1979 ghost train fire, in which seven people, including six children, were killed, but abandoned that idea as too complex.

“We then tapped into this idea of an exodus – so many generations of children have been through here and not returned. [Some] have been shipped off to war and not come back, to put it bluntly,” Barclay said.

The result, Night Songs at Coney Island, featuring Sydney Philharmonia choirs, opera singers Peter Coleman-Wright (a tenor) and Cheryl Barker (a soprano) with a 35-strong children’s ensemble and a chamber orchestra performing music by Mahler, Stravinsky and Poulenc, premieres on Monday night at the fun park.

Barclay describes the show as a requiem to honour all the children who have died young and who have passed through Luna Park.

“It is a place for anyone who has lost somebody before their time, to come and process that and feel connected and united with the audience to honour that profound sadness,” he said.

The show starts in the fashion of many trips to Luna Park, on a ferry to the famous Milsons Point face. The audience then makes its way to Coney Island, also commonly known as Funny Land, which was built for the opening of Luna Park in 1935.

The children’s ensemble, chosen from the Sydney Catholic Schools talent development program, play innocently to the Mahler song cycle Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) written in 1904 based on poems by Friedrich Ruckert.

Both composer and poet had known grief, Barclay explains.

“Mahler himself lost eight of his siblings in childhood, and then a young daughter at the age of four, and Ruckert’s poems are about the death of his two young children,” Barclay explains.

Despite what sounds like a grim subject, one of the child performers, 13-year-old Jordan Gedeon, said the overall message was uplifting.

“This production actually shows you how a child thinks and acts and how they use their imagination to get through difficult times,” the St Vincent’s College Ashfield student said.

St Christopher’s Catholic Primary School Holsworthy student Milania Hall said the show was a chance to walk in a child’s shoes again.

“We act out the innocence of children and how we have to cherish and protect their imaginations, even in wartime,” the 11-year-old said.

Jordan Gedeon, 13, Milania Hall, 11, and Xavier Daher, 11 in Coney Island’s barrels of fun.

Xavier Daher, 11, from St Charles Catholic Primary School Waverley, who has starred in Mary Poppins as Michael Banks and toured with the production to Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne said the show “is a bit of like a protest against war and how children are forced to take on adult roles in times of war”.

Barclay said he hopes the audience finds the music as “transcendent” as he does.

Visiting US Marine cadets in the barrel of fun at Sydney’s Luna Park in 1944.

“The show explains my connections to this music and how much it means to be working with these kids at this time as I am still really grieving the loss of the children my wife Jo never got to have,” he said.

“I look at the faces of these kids and their smiles and I can tap into their laughter and joy which is really helping at a time when I am still really raw.”

Night Songs at Coney Island runs from January 22-25 as part of the Sydney Festival.