Sydney Festival launches with lights, action and masks

It was touch and go whether a stripped back COVID-safe Sydney Festival would go ahead this year, but it got off to a powerhouse start with a little opera

Jessica O'Donoghue and Andrew Goodwin appearing in Future Remains for Sydney Chamber Opera at the Sydney Festival. Picture: Lisa Tomasetti

• ‘Tis time to be Merry … at last
• Stripped back tribute to genius
• An hour for healing
• Master storyteller's joyful bash

It was touch and go whether a stripped back COVID-safe Sydney Festival would go ahead this year, but despite some artists having to cancel because of interstate travel restrictions it got off to a powerhouse start with Sydney Chamber Opera’s production Future Remains at Eversleigh’s Carriageworks.

The 70-minute show before a masked audience of about 90 pitted two song cycles – one of them an established classic, the other a world premiere Australian work – against each other in a compelling unbroken performance featuring tenor Andrew Goodwin and soprano singer-composer Jessica O’Donoghue.

Czech composer Leos Janacek’s song cycle The Diary of One Who Disappeared, 22 short poems that feature a tenor, a soprano and a chorus of three voices, was written in the final productive decade of the composer’s life and was completed in 1920. Its storyline is suitably trite, most operas are: a stereotypical village boy meets and becomes obsessed with a stereotypical mysterious “gypsy girl” – think Carmen – and leaves his family and the prospect a “decent” marriage to go with her and their baby son.

ROSES

A single spot lights the minimalist stage – a circle of paper petals ringed by fluorescent tubes – and the theatre’s post-industrial surrounds. Musical director Jack Symonds sits at a concert grand off to the side, augmented by a synthesiser with an array of tricks for later in the show.

Andrew Goodwin as Janik in The Diary Of One Who Disappeared. Picture: Lisa Tomasetti

Janik, beautifully sung by Goodwin, walks on clutching a bunch of red roses in an evening suit with tie undone. After telling us he’s met this girl Zefka, she enters with a glass of wine in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other. She seduces him, despite his worries about upsetting his mother, and sings a song which casts a spell on him, before disappearing and leaving him sleeping.

His subsequent sexual and violent fantasies about Zefka are evoked by a visceral piano solo in which Janacek is at his most progressive.

Complementing and contrasting Janacek’s superb masterwork is the world premiere of Fumeblind Oracle, by Australian composer Huw Belling and writer Pierce Wilcox.

At various stages in Wilcox’s 22 often witty and caustic poems two actors with giant cyclops heads come on stage wielding smoke machines

This follows the structure of the Janacek work but takes an explosive feminist stance to dismantle the stereotypical (mis) treatment of women in this and so many operas. Belling’s score sometimes brilliantly parodies Janacek and combines a variety of styles and sounds, including the use of a simple Melodica, barrel-house jazz piano and some heavily layered electronica.

At various stages in Wilcox’s 22 often witty and caustic poems two actors with giant cyclops heads come on stage wielding smoke machines and various objects as props for O’Donoghue’s tour de force portrayals of goddesses and heroines from Greek mythology – Elektra, Ariadne and Pythia the oracle among them. At the climax a huge wind machine is wheeled on. O’Donoghue walks towards it in seeming slow motion while the petals are blown far and wide.

To crown her brilliant and compelling performance O’Donoghue covers herself in blood and dances a crazy waltz in her underwear for a harrowing finale that recalls the famous mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor.

It runs until January 10.

A word of warning: I did feel that the seat rows in this small theatre were too close to each other for comfortable social distancing, although there was plenty of space at the sides.

SYDNEY FESTIVAL

● CONCERT Future Remains

● WHERE Carriageworks

● WHEN Wednesday, January 6