Bloomsday comes to life in surrealist ‘faux drama’ for Ulysses fans

THEATRE
Circe’s Carnival of Vice ★★★
Bloomsday in Melbourne, 45 downstairs, until June 22

Literary types won’t need reminding that June 16 is the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses is set.

It’s been celebrated as Bloomsday – after the central character, Leopold Bloom – since the novel’s publication in 1922, and Melbourne sports a crew of devoted Joyceans who stage performances, seminars and gatherings to honour the legendary modernist writer every year.

A scene from Circe’s Carnival of Vice showing at fortyfivedownstairs theatre in Melbourne.Credit: Jody Jane Stitt

Some of their past theatre has been memorable – an ambitious indie production of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties (in which James Joyce is a character), or a rare performance of Joyce’s only published play, Exiles – and in Circe’s Carnival of Vice, they take on the daunting challenge of staging the Circe chapter of Ulysses.

Here, we find Bloom and Stephen Dedalus visiting a kip-house (brothel) in Dublin’s infamous red-light district, the Monto. At first blush, it seems a natural and inviting fit for theatrical adaptation. This is, after all, the section of Ulysses written in the form of a play-text – a “faux drama” complete with stage directions.

Yet it also contains an extended descent into surrealism that makes it, if not technically unstageable, then at least prone to swinish transmogrification when it encounters the magic of theatre.

Director Wayne Pearn has adopted an aesthetic common to European surrealist drama of the 1920.Credit: Jody Jane Sitt

Director Wayne Pearn adopts an aesthetic common to European surrealist drama of the 1920s. The actors perform in whiteface and garishly exaggerated period costume, throwing themselves into a fever-dream of gender and sexuality, probing inequities, insecurities and forbidden fantasies, as well as nightmares from which we’re all still trying to awake.

Eric Moran’s Bloom undergoes various transformations from a mild-mannered baseline. He swells into ridiculous majesty and celebrity in the kingdom of his own mind, before dwindling as he is changed into a woman. This part slips and swoons between kinky sex comedy – Bloom seems to enjoy forced feminisation, or becoming a bondslave to one of the kip-houses’ ferocious, gender-bending madams (Kelly Nash) – and the horror of unresolved grief.

The agony of Bloom in childbirth might be bathetic, a ridiculous spectacle, but it opens the door to haunting memories of his dead son, Rudy, and the effects of trauma on him and his wife, Molly (Kim Devitt).

Not everything in Circe’s Carnival of Vice works theatrically. There are patches of both unconfident and over-the-top acting, a climactic moment that Ryan Haran’s Dedalus fails to land, and it might well be too immersive and confusing an experience for the merely Joyce-curious among us.

For those who’ve read Ulysses, however, it’s a lively adaptation of a part of the novel that attracted the ire of censors – and a forceful reminder of how rich and psychologically astute Joyce was, how committed to portraying the world as it is rather than as we’d like it to be.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

JAZZ
James Shortland Quartet & Lerner / Jansen / Greenhill ★★★★
The JazzLab, June 15

One of the most valuable aspects of the Melbourne Jazz Co-operative’s weekly presentations at JazzLab is the platform it provides for young and emerging artists, helping them establish a profile with local audiences.

Sunday night’s double bill paired two youthful ensembles that shared the same drummer (Sydney’s George Greenhill). The opening set was led by bassist James Shortland, who recently moved from Sydney to Melbourne and has been developing his voice as a composer. He presented his appealing original tunes in a quartet setting, accompanied by Greenhill and two Melbourne players (saxophonist Toby Barrett and pianist James Bowers).

Bowers played a key role in shaping the dynamics of each piece, offering lyrical introductions on ballads such as Skylight, and building momentum beneath his bandmates’ animated solos. Several tunes were buoyed by a subtle Latin undercurrent courtesy of Shortland and Greenhill – including the set’s final number (Emergence), which was suffused with warmth and positivity.

Drummer George Greenhill with bassist Nick Jansen.Credit: Credit: Roger Mitchell

Greenhill was back for the second set, forming one-third of a potent Sydney-based trio. The drummer has been working with saxophonist Ben Lerner and bassist Nick Jansen since 2020, and the three have developed a powerfully persuasive group sound.

Their impressive debut album – Play Trio – has just been released, featuring compositions by artists who inspired them. On Sean Wayland’s John Barker, their nimble reflexes were on display as they sprinted across the melody with taut precision, before Lerner spiralled off into an agitated, angular solo.

Kurt Rosenwinkel’s Synthetics was a speedy, bop-fuelled sprint, Lerner’s lines tumbling forth with remarkable fluency as Jansen and Greenhill pushed at the beat like ebullient jockeys. Lykeif had a more expansive, open-time feel, incorporating a vigorous three-way dialogue of split-tone squawks, exploratory bass and textural drums.

With Greenhill now based in New York (and Lerner soon to follow), this was a rare opportunity to see some exciting young players whose stars are well and truly on the rise.
Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas

MUSIC
Jimmy Barnes ★★★
Palais Theatre, June 13

When I was a child, I got a Jimmy Barnes CD out of a packet of muesli bars. I didn’t have a CD player, so I just had to imagine what it might sound like.

I already had enough Barnesy in my blood to have a good guess. His songs are part of the Australian collective unconscious. They play in our dreams. They give them away in muesli bar packets.

Barnes is now touring his 21st studio album, Defiant. A few hours before he took to the stage, it went to No. 1 in the album charts. It’s his 15th No.1 album (19th if you count Cold Chisel). He plays virtually all of that record tonight. His gruff yarl is undiminished by age and recent heart surgery.

However, the new songs – gruff pub rock beasts about struggle and defiance – struggle themselves. The essence is all here, but the lyrics are a bit live-laugh-love (“It’s a new day / I can feel the sun shining down on me”).

Jimmy Barnes at The Palais, touring his 21st studio album, Defiant.Credit: Richard Clifford

It all buckles under the weight of a nine-piece band. Songs like The Long Road and Dig Deep are rote, mid-tempo, middle-of-the-road Barnesy. They could have come out any time since 1991. Album opener That’s What You Do For Love gives it all a lift (possibly because it reminds me of Born To Run).

Taken all at once, it’s a slog. The audience waits (mostly) patiently, as the new material is scattered with familiar stuff like Choirgirl and I’d Die To Be Alone With You Tonight.

It’s when the opening piano of Flame Trees kicks in that everything changes. “A real one,” my friend says. The crowd stands up en masse. People join in on the second line. By the chorus, it’s a choir. “But oh,” he sings, “who needs that sentimental bullshit, anyway?” It’s a beautiful song about the past escaping from us.

From here, the set lifts considerably. Barnes introduces his wife Jane on backing vocals and occasionally bagpipes, and daughter Mahalia, who’s raced from the Princess Theatre, where she’s Mary in Jesus Christ Superstar. They duet on Good Times, with Mahalia taking Michael Hutchence’s part. Ride the Night Away and Working Class Man unite the crowd.

The crowd sang along as Jimmy Barnes performed Flame Trees.Credit: Richard Clifford

The final encore of Khe Sanh clinches it: we’re in the presence of something bigger than us, bigger than Barnesy even. It’s yearning, living, a piece of history. Perhaps it didn’t need wailing two guitar solos and a Hammond organ solo.

Outside, a busker dressed as a pirate axes through Working Class Man on an acoustic. It’s a bold gambit, following Barnesy on his own material – but a song like that is bigger than any of us.
Reviewed by Will Cox

MUSIC
Invenio – Bits and Pieces ★★★★
Tempo Rubato, June 12

I still have vivid memories of seeing Invenio’s very first show – Gone, Without Saying – in 2010.

Fourteen singers (including the group’s leader and composer, Gian Slater) presented an arresting suite that explored extended vocal techniques, wordless singing, improvisation and choreographed movements, along with intricate multi-part harmonies and songs with poetic lyrics. Some passages were startlingly strange and experimental; some so tender and moving that they left audience members in tears.

A decade and a half later, Slater’s vision of an unconventional vocal ensemble continues to bear rich fruit, and Invenio serves as a beacon of creativity and commitment in Melbourne’s art music community. Slater now has a collective of about 30 dedicated singers to draw from, 12 of whom performed at Tempo Rubato on Thursday night.

This concert marked Invenio’s 15th anniversary, and the program ranged widely across the group’s extensive back catalogue. It opened with Banterer (from Gone, Without Saying), where the singers held various kitchen implements – bowls, saucers, teacups – in front of their mouths as they twittered, stuttered and whispered, before coalescing into unison syllables and rhythmic cycles that intersected and overlapped with perfect precision.

Fight Eyes had the feel of an evocative folk song, with lush three-part harmonies that occasionally diverged into subtle trills or sustained drones. On Growing Pains, the bass and tenor voices sang the lyrics, while the altos and sopranos quivered, pulsed and slid up and down in a series of elongated, wordless sighs.

Unconventional vocal ensemble, Invenio.

And for Warm Bodies – perhaps the most affecting piece of the night – the singers moved down the aisles and along the back of the room as they sang, enveloping the audience in a delicate harmonic field that resonated with a hushed, almost hymnal beauty.

We also heard three new pieces from a forthcoming album, suggesting that while 15 years is an impressive milestone, Invenio’s journey of inspiration and discovery is far from over. Long may it continue.
Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas

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