Theatre
By The Last Great Hunt
The Stables
Tuesday 3rd February

Yoshi (Adriane Daff) and Tilly (Arielle Gray) are half sisters who, before their father died, had never met. Yoshi lives in Japan, where she creates video games and embraces the culture and look of kawaii. She also fiercely values independence. Tilly is a fully qualified nurse and had been looking after her sick father in her childhood home until his death. She loves historical fiction, Jane Austen and Autumnal tones.

Yoshi and Tilly are two different sides of femininity; Yoshi is determined to forge a successful path in a masculine industry, creating the strong female centred games she wishes she’d been able to play as a girl, all the while maintaining her cute-as-a-button kawaii look. Tilly on the other hand chose a more traditional female role, the one of nurse and carer. Her female role models are the wives of Henry the Eighth and the heroines of Jane Austen, and her only experience of the world is through these historical figures and characters.

Daff and Gray skilfully lead us through ups and downs of the sisters’ first meeting as the two contrasting characters pull and push at each other, trying to work the other out, often clashing, but then coming together to be perfectly in sync. Although named Yoshi’s Castle, Tilly is most certainly the heroine of this story. We laugh at her naivety and misunderstanding of the more world wise Yoshi, but she captures our heart strings and refuses to let go with her child-like delight in talking about the things she loves. Or simply her happiness to have Yoshi as a friend such as when Yoshi helps her dress up in the kawaii look. Tilly’s state of mind is shown through the books and characters she so dearly loves, as they are the only way she has been able to experience the world independent from her sick father. Even when presented with real life independence, she can only express it though books, crying that she thought she owned a Kerouac book, but she doesn’t and how can she travel without Kerouac?

Told with the help of a beautifully animated video projection and Mario inspired music created by Alwyn Nixon-Lloyd from the Perth band Boys Boys Boys!, Yoshi’s Castle slams together two very different worlds and the resulting residue is a magical, funny, sparkly story that will leave you with a happy sad lump in your throat and shows that, regardless of whether you are a Lolita or an Anglophile, femininity and independence are never mutually exclusive.

Yoshi’s Castle runs until Monday 9 February at 6:45pm at The Stables. Tickets are available here