By John Shand, Chantal Nguyen, Bernard Zuel, Peter McCallum and Frances Howe
GASLIGHT
Roslyn Packer Theatre, August 23
Until September 8
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★
How much gothic can an innocent young city like Sydney, so absorbed in trains and whales, bear? In less than six months, we’ve had Frame Narrative, Dracula, The Woman in Black and now Gaslight. On this night’s evidence, that’s one too many. Gaslight is billed as a Victorian gothic thriller, but when the audience laughs rather than gasps at the moments of highest tension, you know you’re in some bother.
Canadians Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson have adapted Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, which was made into a film that won Ingrid Bergman an Oscar. Between them, the play and the film gave us “gaslighting” as a verb: undermining someone for personal gain. Wright and Jamieson intended to empower the protagonist, Bella, so she can save herself from her dastardly husband, Jack, rather than needing another male to step in. So far, so good, except that, in so doing, they’ve torn much suspense out of the story’s fabric.
Kate Fitzpatrick, here with Geraldine Hakewill, “composes her face into a brick wall with a mouth″.Credit: Brett Boardman
This Queensland production, directed by Lee Lewis, tries valiantly to save the play from itself, and it frequently succeeds because Lewis has cast it so well. The fabulous Kate Fitzpatrick makes a welcome return to a Sydney stage in the role of Elizabeth, the couple’s housekeeper. Fitzpatrick composes her face into a brick wall with a mouth, and puts more import into “you rang, sir?” than most of the lines seem to accommodate.
Casting Toby Schmitz as the ruthless Jack was smart, too. Anyone can play a scheming villain, but Schmitz, as well as being masterful in his early ominous restraint, innately lends the character some charisma, making it vaguely credible that Bella (Geraldine Hakewill) could fall for him. Courtney Cavallaro delineates Nancy, the maid, from the others’ stiffness via a combination of surliness and slovenliness rather than giving us a full broadside of flirtatiousness. Nancy is also the sharpest blade in a rather blunt knife set.
Hakewill has a harder time. Her performance is certainly accomplished as she flutters about like a bird than cannot settle. The problem is that Bella is so ineffectual until she becomes resolute, and by then, just when our jaws should be tensing, the play turns into a comedy. Some of that amusement is intended (including in Bella winning out), but some is because the drama is overblown.
At one point, Jack says “isn’t that a bit melodramatic?” and, compounded by the usually exceptional composer Paul Charlier doing his own bit to inflate it all, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the audience had shouted, “Yes!” The dialogue at such times corners the acting into an archness that can tip over into falseness, and Hakewill’s character suffers the most in this regard.
The upshot is work that is not just set in Victorian London, it feels like it’s being performed there, too. Renee Mulder gives us the expected wood-panelled set, yet, among the two dozen pictures on the walls, the all-important portrait of the house’s previous occupant, who was murdered, is too small for us to see her rather important ruby necklace.
Ultimately, it’s not creepy enough, and the tension doesn’t build in the way the idiom demands, with a kind of breathlessness being substituted. The key attraction in the latter stages for many in the audience came in seeing Jack get his comeuppance, but that felt more like a prequel to 9 to 5 than anything resembling a gothic thriller or psychological drama. See it for the actors rather than the play.
Eternal Light
Pinchgut Opera
City Recital Hall, August 24
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½
Pianist and scholar Charles Rosen described a famous problematic note in Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata as a mistake that was a stroke of genius. The well-known version of Allegri’s Miserere, in which the soprano leaps up to a spine-tingling top C in the last line of the refrain is in a similar category.
It arises from an editor’s mistake in trying to recreate the usually unwritten ornamentation that singers reputedly added to the original. Modern listeners have become addicted to the endorphins the mistake releases and hear the original without feeling they have had their fix.
Pinchgut Opera director Erin Helyard sought both to correct and indulge the mistake. To start the program, vocal ensemble Cantillation, placed in the middle balcony above the City Recital Hall stage, sang a version based on the bare-bones original manuscript in the Sistine Chapel but with historically informed vocal embellishments by tenor Jacob Lawrence.
Pinchgut Opera director Erin Helyard.
The sound was even, transparent and coloured, and the embellishments enlivened upper and inner parts like animating movement in flowing water. Similar ornamentation graced the lines of the first of two sonatas by Johann Schmelzer performed by members of the Orchestra of the Antipodes before Helyard played a Ciacona in F minor by Pachelbel, its dignified pace setting out the restrained but subtle ranges of colour in the small chamber organ with thoughtful quietness.
The centrepiece and true glory of this concert was Heinrich von Biber’s Requiem in F minor, in which the singers joined an instrumental group of strings, organ, theorbo, harp and trombones on the main stage to create a sound of serenely balanced smoothness, with the richness of velvet and the serenity of glistening twilight.
The work constantly varies the combinations of instruments and voices to create a textural tapestry of cohesive glow, animated by multiple sonic details. Andrew O’Connor sang with a tone of rich burgundy against trombones, while sopranos Lana Kains, Bonnie de la Hunty and mezzo Olivia Payne created a glistening trio against strings, theorbo and harp.
Louis Hurley’s tenor voice had plaintive expressiveness and the whole ensemble came together for passages of rewarding contrapuntal complexity. Another sonata by Schmelzer provided an interlude for the singers to split into two choirs and return to the galleries for the popular, apocryphal version of Allegri’s Miserere.
The first choir sang with balanced austere beauty from the middle. From the very highest gallery, the second choir made the unexpected extra ascent from to G to C with heart-stopping grace, though after the rewards of the Biber, the endorphins were scarcely needed.
Tones and I
Hordern Pavilion, August 23
Reviewed by FRANCES HOWE
★★★
Early on, Tones and I said she was the kind of person who performed as though they never would again. It makes sense, then, for her almost two-hour show to be gorged with a band, four dancers, a choir, strobe lights, pyrotechnics, a confetti cannon, frisbees and several heartfelt monologues in an all-you-can-eat offering when we would have been fine with a regular serve.
The choir is introduced almost from the outset alongside her dancers, one of whom rides a scooter from one side of the stage to the other and doesn’t make a return appearance. Behind her, visuals of the Brooklyn Bridge don’t mirror the themes of the song Never Seen the Rain (High School Musical-esque) nor the one immediately after, also featuring one too many metaphors about the weather – Cloudy Day.
Tones and I plays each show as if it might be her last.Credit: Edwina Pickles
Tones and I’s voice is not fault-free but her tone (easily one of the most divisive in Australian music) sounds smoother live than recorded. Tones and I is giving everything she has. She talks about her grandfather’s passing and sings Sorrento, the song she wrote about him.
She tears up during a cover of Coldplay’s Fix You, which she struggles to finish. She delivers Dance Monkey almost exactly as the recorded version sounds. Just before Fix You, she says this show was the longest performance she had ever given. “Right now in my career, this is the best show I can give you,” she told us.
“I want you guys to constantly never know what’s going to happen next.”
If that was her goal, she succeeded. Despite the circus going on around her, it’s easy to soften when she talks. In a mixed-bag crowd of Dance Monkey fans and families with young children, she is playing to anyone who will listen.
She’s empowering and then she’s vulnerable. She’s trying to do it all for everyone and, despite that being an impossible task, she gives it a good crack.
Tones and I returns to Sydney for a show at the Opera House Forecourt on November 30
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Belvoir St Theatre, August 22
Until September 24
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★
Christopher doesn’t do non-verbal communication. Nor does he do metaphors or lying – so he’s deeply suspicious of plays and acting. And he hates being touched so much that he instinctively lashes out at the offender. What he does is maths and physics. At a high level. At 15 years, three months and two days old.
Christopher can tell if it’s going to be a good day or a bad day by the cars he sees on the way to school: four red cars in a row means a good one; a stream of yellow cars means such a bad day that he’ll have to squat in the corner, put his hands over his ears and groan. Endlessly. Luckily, he goes to a special school and has a special teacher, Siobhan, who instils helpful ways to deal with a hostile world, like breathing, counting prime numbers and writing the story of what’s happening to him.
Christopher (Daniel R Nixon) has a rat called Toby because he’s not allowed to have a dog.Credit: Brett Boardman
So Christopher just about gets by, until the night Wellington is killed. With a garden fork. Wellington is – was – a dog belonging to a neighbour, and Christopher likes dogs. He has a rat called Toby because he’s not allowed to have a dog. So when Wellington’s killed, he decides to play detective. “Detecting” as he calls it, is rather like a mathematical puzzle, only it involves people, and people do stuff that’s alien to Christopher: they emote.
Mark Haddon’s vivid novel, adapted for the stage by Simon Stephens and here directed by Hannah Goodwin, is written from Christopher’s point of view, so the world is loud, overbearing, irrational and scary. His behavioural difference is not specified; it is to limit Christopher to define him by labels.
But his first-person voice in the novel is so singular as to create a massive challenge for Stephens: one that, oddly, is not so very different from the problem in dramatising Jane Austen’s works. Austen’s ultimate genius lay in her ironic narration, which is usually the first casualty of any dramatisation. Stephens has tried to solve the problem of Christopher’s narration by various devices, including having Siobhan read to us from Christopher’s journal – as well as he’s done it, some of the magic of that unique perspective is lost.
He’s partially substituted playfulness, and Goodwin has assembled a cast that revels in this aspect of the work, as well as giving us most of the heartbreak and most of the warmth. But not quite all.
Daniel R Nixon takes us as deep inside Christopher’s mind as the play allows, and makes us empathise with someone who doesn’t do empathy. It’s a potent performance, especially when he enacts Christopher’s scrupulously logical decision-making process of what course of action to take once he identifies Wellington’s killer.
Brandon McClelland embodies all the inner conflict and frustration of Christopher’s inwardly turned father, while Matilda Ridgway delivers a live-wire version of his equally conflicted but more extroverted mother. Brigid Zengeni is exceptional as Siobhan: not just a narrator and teacher, but also Christopher’s confidante and conscience. Nicholas Brown, Roy Joseph, Tracy Mann and a very amusing Ariadne Sgouros complete the cast, all ably playing multiple roles.
The walls of Zoe Atkinson’s set consist of squares of shades of grey, like the board for a game: for the puzzle that’s the life playing out in Christopher’s head; a head full of wonders. This is theatre as a state of mind, and if it doesn’t shake you up as much as the book, it still brims with humanity.
INDance 2024 Week Two
Sydney Dance Company Neilson Studio
August 22 to 24
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★
Modern dance cliches – the bad ones – often involve shapeless bags, near-darkness, long periods of repetitive or very slow movement and superfluous nudity. Perhaps this is why modern dance is sometimes unfairly labelled as self-indulgent or inaccessible. Unfortunately, INDance Week Two featured all those tropes.
INDance is Sydney Dance Company’s annual celebration of independent contemporary dancemakers. Last year’s INDance Week Two had the outstanding Here Now (Ryuichi Fujimura) and The Complication of Lyrebirds (Jasmin Sheppard) – both deeply human, funny and creative. This year’s is a disappointment, as the dances lack either innovation or artistic maturity.
In SUB, the dancers are clad in boiler suits, which they repeatedly strip off then put on again.Credit: Ivan Trigo Miras
The first piece was Kristina Chan’s ecologically inspired Brightness, a duet in a minimalist set. Despite the name, it’s mostly performed in subdued lighting, with the artists moving slowly across the space in repetitive sequences to James Brown’s organic soundscore. They finally strip off their clothes – in a scene that reminds one of pulling candy – to roll very slowly under large sheets laid across the stage. One finally performs a protracted naked headstand.
Brown’s soundscore is meditative and quite relaxing, but the dance vocabulary is painfully lacking and ultimately feels self-indulgent. It features repetitive, at times pedestrian movement where sequences seem deficient in phrasing, and the overall structure is inert. One gets the impression the dancers were technically capable of more sophisticated movement, but the choreography does not give scope. Significantly, it’s unclear what the relationship is between the two dancers, or the audience, or the environment around them – troubling for a piece that is about connection to environment.
The second piece, SUB by Ashleigh Musk in collaboration, similarly focuses on ecology. Musk draws inspiration from subterranean activity, including the sociopolitical tensions of mining and the flow of underground water. The dancers are clad in boiler suits, which they repeatedly strip off then put on again.
There’s a giant orange tarpaulin that they spray with water and slide across, before drying themselves by a rack of hairdryers. There’s also a mass of silver insulation pipes that the dancers blow into, flail around, or place across taut ropes. Various microphones used to create body percussion are less successful. SUB has inventive moments and great lighting (Jenny Hector’s design), and thankfully less self-indulgence than Brightness. But again it feels repetitive and immature, ultimately lacking the structure or variety to sustain momentum.
Belle And Sebastian and Badly Drawn Boy
Enmore Theatre, August 22
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★
These two acts might be called the eternal anti-Brexiteers. They are part of a particular branch of British pop that is most comfortable in continental mode.
This branch is sometimes acoustic, but never boorish, sometimes vulnerable, but always willing to explain (even if not necessarily successfully), sometimes topical while always drawing on the past as if it was just yesterday. And eschewing perfection, seeing it as a false god.
Nearly 30 years on, Belle And Sebastian are a smooth entertainment machine.Credit: Deb Pelser
Badly Drawn Boy, Manchester’s Damon Gough, leans into the hushed men/Francoise Hardy school of murmured regrets and autumnal tones, though Once Around The Block reached for bachelor pad buoyancy. Meanwhile, Glasgow’s Belle And Sebastian are more inclined to mix that patina of melancholy with ye-ye’s springtime bounce – even if, in the encore, the fragment of The Fox In The Snow laid lamentations.
For Gough, the initial tristesse due to sound problems may have brought twitches to those who remember a previous Sydney show that also was dogged and scarred by his unhappiness with the sound. Thankfully his bonhomie was retrieved, and dry humour (explaining he was only hired for the About A Boy soundtrack because he could write a cheaper version of a Dylan song, like the marvellous A Minor Incident) and casual warmth returned.
Speaking of casual, there is something almost offhand about these songs, as if they are visiting and will be forgotten soon enough as light fare. It is a deception, a McCartney-ish familiarity, as seen in the caressing singalong, Silent Sigh, played on might-as-well-be-pub-piano, which masks songs that lodge hard.
No hesitations of any sort for Belle And Sebastian whose opening bracket came with joi de vivre that could fire an opening ceremony, dancing with little hip wiggles and splayed feet, still rhyming Tokyo and Thin Lizzy-O like a gleeful provocation to the grumps.
Still happy too to have cello, violin and trumpet alongside recorder as lead fare, or later offer double melodicas against throbbing bass and a guitar solo leached of macho but not of cocky moves. Still able to bring a blend of Beach Boys, psych pop and zipping around the playground vim in So In The Moment. Still able to follow it with a fey slant on mournful desire that builds to a strangely glowing acceptance in Stars Of Track And Field.
As the funky moves of Talk To Me would confirm, they are miles from the enthusiastic amateurs of their early years who charmed with seemingly no guile, though you can hear echoes of that band in Piazza, New York Catcher, which falls between children’s folk song and naive Simon & Garfunkel, and the wonky Velvet Underground romanticism of Seymour Stein.
Nearly 30 years into what once was thought an unlikely career, they are a smooth entertainment machine. One that knows the corners of their catalogue to pull from for the certain win (the first five to 10 years are audience gold) while still grabbing from a wide menu. One that understands the value of breaking down a wall and letting the freak flag fly: inviting the audience to the stage for the flouncing fun of The Boy With The Arab Strap, drawing up dorks with grins, the uncool with odd moves, the arhythmic with zeal. You know, exactly like the rest of us, just faster getting a spot.
And one that can the set with a blast of positivism (Another Sunny Day) and then leave us, just short of two hours, with a promise of something brighter still in the bitter-but-drinkable Lazy Line Painter June. “You will have a boy tonight/Maybe you will have a girl tonight/On the last bus out of town.“
A boy and a girl? Ooh, how very European.