What happens when a painting worth millions turns out to be a fake? And can a forgery ever make us feel something real?
These are among the questions at the heart of ROHTKO, a spectacular, high-tech theatrical thriller that will make its Australian premiere at Perth Festival 2027 – in an exclusive season that brings one of Europe’s most ambitious contemporary theatre productions to Australian audiences.
ROHTKO at Perth Festival 2027 – quick links
The true crime behind ROHTKO
Directed by acclaimed Polish theatre-maker Łukasz Twarkowski and performed by an international cast, ROHTKO takes its inspiration from one of the art world’s most notorious scandals.
In 2004, art collectors Domenico and Eleanore De Sole paid US$8.3 million for a painting they believed was an original work by abstract expressionist Mark Rothko. Seven years later, they discovered it was a forgery, allegedly created by Chinese artist Pei-Shen Qian, who had been living in Queens, New York.
The painting was among dozens of fraudulent works sold through the prestigious Knoedler Gallery, in a scandal involving around US$70 million in fakes.
Rather than simply dramatising the fraud, ROHTKO uses the story as a springboard for a much bigger investigation into authenticity, value and the slippery boundaries between reality and illusion.
The next wave of international theatre
With a pumping techno soundtrack, live cameras, enormous LED screens and a transforming set, ROHTKO promises an immersive experience that blurs the boundaries between theatre and cinema.
The production’s revolving set moves audiences between a Chinese restaurant and the world of high-end art galleries, while live video and cinematic imagery unfold alongside the action on stage.
For Perth Festival’s artistic director Anna Reece, the work represents an exciting shift in contemporary theatre-making – one that Australian audiences should have the opportunity to experience.
‘The future … it’s coming now. This is how major international theatre work is being made now,’ she observed, when addressing media gathered at a recent preview event for the 2027 program.
Reece sees ROHTKO as part of a new wave of theatre that brings together technology, cinema and live performance, redefining what can happen on stage. Crucially, she says, its technical spectacle doesn’t come at the expense of the human element: among the production’s elaborate visual effects are moments of stillness that hone in on the actors’ performances, allowing the emotion to cut through.
Of course, local theatre fanatics will know that Australian director Kip Williams (previously the youngest ever leader of Sydney Theatre Company) also has a reputation for working at the cutting-edge of theatre and film.
Williams’ epic ‘cine-theatre’ productions successfully transferred to Broadway and the West End in recent years, including The Picture of Dorian Gray (which will return to Australian stages as the hero of STC’s 2027 program) and his one-woman adaptation of Dracula starring Cynthia Erivo.
While Williams has developed a distinctive iteration of this form, ROHTKO offers a glimpse of how international artists are experimenting with cinema, technology and performance on an extraordinary scale.
‘It’s truly spectacular,’ says Reece. ‘It’s a new wave of theatremaking out of Europe that’s really redefining what’s happening on stage. Certainly, it’s what all of our theatre students and technicians should be seeing [in order to] to really embrace or challenge this this new way of making.’
Why is the show title deliberately misspelt?
Drawing on the idea of typoglycaemia – that we can often read a word even when its letters are jumbled, as long as the first and last letters stay in place – the production’s deliberately scrambled title is another clue to its preoccupation with the relationship between the authentic and the counterfeit.
As Reece explains, the spelling plays with the way famous brands are imitated with counterfeit names – like ‘Adibas’ or ‘Dolce & Banana’ – raising questions about whether the distinction between an original and a copy is always as clear-cut as we might imagine.
The work also draws on South Korean-born philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s book Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese, which considers different cultural understandings of originality and imitation. As Reece described it, the Western idea of something being made and finished contrasts with a Chinese conception in which things continue to evolve.
It makes for what Reece calls a ‘multi-layered intellectual thriller’ – one that asks audiences to consider not only what makes art valuable, but who gets to decide.
A festival of truth tellers and mystery makers
ROHTKO is a fitting centrepiece for a Perth Festival program that Reece describes as ‘a festival of truth tellers, mystery makers, sand dunes and salty air’.
Now in her third year as artistic director, Reece says she wants the festival to bring international artists into conversation with Perth and its local stories, challenging the perception of the Western Australian capital as a ‘tight little village across the sand dunes’.
Running from 5 to 28 February, the 2027 program features 24 days of events, including seven festival commissions, two world premieres, and eight Australian premieres or exclusives. Alongside ROHTKO, several other theatrical highlights explore the possibilities of form, technology and storytelling.
Revered Perth-based artistic collective The Last Great Hunt will present the world premiere of witches.exe, a genre-bending journey into the weird and lawless early days of the internet. Following two young girls whose online friendship takes an increasingly strange turn, the production combines projection, soft sculpture, puppetry, animation and live performance.
Meanwhile, Danish company Hotel Pro Forma returns to a work created three decades ago with Operation:Orfeo, a visually striking opera inspired by the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Reece describes it as a remarkable meditation on our relationship with screens, which feels particularly prescient given the technological experiments of contemporary theatre.
Acclaimed as one of the most internationally celebrated works in Danish theatre history, this special anniversary tour comes across to Perth after playing at Arts Centre Melbourne.
There is also Taverna Miseria – Mario, Bella, Anastasia, a largely wordless exploration of grief, family and memory from Greek director Mario Banushi, recently awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale; and 1975 | Naoi Déag Seachtó Cúig, a joyous dance work by Irish choreographer Michael Keegan-Dolan, inspired by the music of legendary Irish traditional group The Bothy Band.
Beyond the theatres, the festival continues its commitment to making art part of the city’s public life. First Nations-led light and sound installation Karla Bidi (meaning ‘fire trail’ in Noongar) will expand beyond the city and along the coast, while An Inheritance invites almost 500 Western Australian primary school students to imagine what they want to tell children living a century from now.
Closing out the program is Kite Choir, a free interactive installation that transforms a garden of soaring kites into a living chorus of young voices from around the world, which will take over the sky above the South Perth Foreshore after an earlier iteration debuts as part of Sydney Festival’s dynamic 2027 program.
For Reece, these projects reflect the festival’s ambition to connect Perth with the world while celebrating the stories and artists of Western Australia.
But with ROHTKO arriving for its Australian-exclusive season, the festival is also making a bold statement about the kind of international work it wants local audiences to encounter: theatre that challenges expectations, embraces new technology, and asks big questions about the world beyond the stage.
