In this perfect gig, Billie Eilish shows there’s nothing she can’t do

MUSIC
BILLIE EILISH
Qudos Bank Arena, February 24
Also performing February 25, 27 and 28
Reviewed by NICK NEWLING
★★★★★

There’s a long tradition of writing off musicians with young fan bases, especially if those fans happen to be teenage girls. It’s far too easy to criticise the throngs of young women who lined up overnight at Olympic Park – and the 23-year-old they slept on concrete to see. But Billie Eilish is not someone to write off.

While there is a touch of the cult of personality on show (virtually everyone – bar their parents – is dressed in oversized football jerseys and bandanas), there is a perfect tenderness Eilish has cultivated among her fanbase that understands the young person’s experience, and she lets it show.

Billie Eilish perfectly taps into the experience of her young fanbase.Credit:

The set list rises and falls, careening from aching ballad to gothic-inspired dance track to secret confessions of erotic angst, mapping neatly to the hormonal rollercoaster of the teenage. Through a performance that sees her sprinting across the stage in upbeat numbers, and lying on the floor during slower numbers, Eilish offers herself completely as a vessel for her fans’ dread and ecstasy.

There is the sense that, while on stage, she is any suburban teenager, locked in their room, aggressively lip-syncing to a song that explains perfectly how they feel. The audience is either peering in the window wondering if she’s OK, or beside her, a best friend at a sleep-over.

The vulnerability creates the night’s most memorable moments. During when the party’s over, Eilish sits on the floor and, with the help of an offstage loop pedal, delicately builds a pitch-perfect harmony that underscores the rest of the track. It is a mesmeric platform for her vocal ability, but more importantly, offers an early invitation for the audience to lean in and embrace the often raw emotions Eilish plays with.

In these tender moments, Eilish acknowledges a reality that so many young people feel – the dual nightmare of dealing with the rollercoaster of puberty and the brutality of a rapidly changing world. Appearing with an acoustic guitar halfway through the set, she sings TV, a ballad about being dragged into the couch while the world spins around you.

It came as no surprise then, when thousands of young women screamed, in unison, the lyric “the internet’s gone wild watching movie stars on trial/ While they’re overturning Roe v Wade.”

Then there are the bawdy hits that brought the crowd to their feet, like bad guy and Guess – which saw the arena painted Brat green and a massive projection of British pop star Charli XCX beamed in. Walking out of the performance one feels that there’s nothing Eilish can’t do, and she might just be convincing her fans the same is true for them.

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HANIA RANI
Sydney Opera House Concert Hall
February 25
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★★½

The lights go down. From stage left the faint beam of a torch lights the way for a slight figure, dressed in black, who weaves through a forest of lights and microphones and squeezes past a grand piano to take their place centre stage. They are surrounded: the grand piano to their left, an upright, its innards exposed, to their right, upstage a bank of keyboards and switchboxes and, to complete the picture, a vast throng of rapt fans.

Hania Rani starts to play. Almost two hours later she stops. The crowd goes wild.

Hania Rani is a quiet global phenomenon.Credit: Sian O’Connor

Polish pianist Hania Rani is a quiet global phenomenon, a classically trained, digitally raised spinner of jazz and pop-infused soundscapes that ebb and flow like the ocean, building from lacy, airy textures to crushing walls of noise. As she explains from the stage in a brief break between songs, this sold-out show at Sydney Opera House comes only two years after she first sat in the auditorium as a first-time visitor to Australia. To be on the other side of the fourth wall is a life challenge unlocked.

Rani meets the challenge with unselfconscious grace, singing tracks from her 2023 album Ghosts that morph into extended explorations of time and space. She spends much of the show with her back to the audience, bent over her tools, moving restlessly, limbs flapping randomly, as if the music has taken control. A wall of projections upstages her technology cave, and lights swing and dazzle into the audience, as if to point our eyes anywhere, everywhere, except at her.

Except that when she opens her mouth and sings, she is impossible to ignore. Her voice is a relatively new addition to this artist’s expansive palette of sounds and textures, but it is instantly gripping, with a raw-edged floatiness which reminds me of Norwegian singer Aurora Aksnes.

Hania Rani finishes her marathon with a deep bow to an audience already on its feet. Today Sydney, next week Adelaide, next month, the world.

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THEATRE
PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK
Drama Theatre, February 21
Until April 5
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★

Joan Lindsay’s fantastical 1967 novel told of colonial Australians trying to tame a land they didn’t understand, and which therefore seemed hostile. Two schoolgirls – a charismatic and a swot – invaded Hanging Rock with a stitched-up teacher and were consumed: unknowing sacrifices to an insatiable god. When people disrupt this world, they become vermin, and will be eradicated.

Lorinda May Merrypor, Kirsty Marillier, Masego Pitso and Olivia De Jonge.Credit: Daniel Boud

Tom Wright took Lindsay’s book, set in 1900, when virtually all the known world consisted of colonies and colonisers, and imagined it as a staged poem. Five women in school uniforms appear, spread across the yawning Drama Theatre stage, and tell us of Appleyard College’s girls being treated to a picnic at nearby Hanging Rock on St Valentine’s Day. We meet the characters, but in a second-hand, narrative way: among Wright’s methods of invoking remoteness.

Already you feel a tug between Wright’s text and Ian Michael’s Sydney Theatre Company production: the former seeks to allegorise the story, while the latter leans closer to naturalism, and the dichotomy jars. Partly it’s due to the inevitable effect of actors without inherently commanding voices being told to play schoolgirls, and partly it’s a matter of staging.

The scenes that work brilliantly are mostly between Olivia De Jonge’s Mrs Appleyard, the strict, English, increasingly brandy-reliant headmistress, and Masego Pitso’s Sarah, the school’s orphaned, arty, victimised non-conformist. That Pitso is black lends a piquancy to Appleyard’s bullying, and here the more stylised acting brings both the characters and their relationship into sharper focus.

Too much of the rest of the production lacks this daring; cries out for more of the acting and staging to be attuned to the language’s mystery, disorientation and alienation. Perhaps it should have been played in slow motion, as Steven Berkoff’s National Theatre production of Wilde’s Salome was, to such unforgettable effect.

Kirsty Marillier is a charming Irma, the girl who seemingly returns from the dead, and also plays a baffled copper. Lorinda May Merrypor and Contessa Treffone complete the cast, and between them the five cover 17 roles, with only changes of voice or removal of hats to offer clues.

Michael somehow had to find a way for the performances to match the sense of wonder implicit in Elizabeth Gadsby’s set, which has a vast white oblong frame hovering ominously above a stage without a rock.

Shapes such as a bowl of hydrangeas, parasols and hats echo each other, emphasised by Trent Suidgeest’s lighting against the stark black background. James Brown’s music, meanwhile, emphasises the supernatural elements, except when its creepiness and volume are ramped up to a histrionic “11” on the dial, when a “five” was all that was required.

Nonetheless, Michael does catch the sense of the invisible Rock weighing on all who survived the picnic: weighing on them in such a way that suggests perhaps the three who disappeared were the ones who got off lightly.

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COMEDY
ANNA AKANA: IT GETS DARKER
Enmore Theatre, February 23
Reviewed by DANIEL HERBORN
★★★★

Silence normally means death in a stand-up show, but the hushed, soundless stretches are electric in Anna Akana’s It Gets Darker. The 35-year-old comic and YouTuber uses both shock comedy and moments of stillness to keep her audience gripped as she retells and recasts the trauma she has seen.

For years, a stalker made Akana’s life miserable, even threatening to kill her as she performed. When she went to the police about the harassment, they initially dismissed her as a “crazy cat lady”. The whole episode saw her quit comedy for a while, but she recounts these years in sharp, risky monologues where there is always laughter to relieve even the most fraught tension.

For years, a stalker made Anna Akana’s life miserable.Credit:

Nothing is safe from Akana’s withering black humour, not even herself. “It doesn’t matter how many horrible things happen,” she quips. “I can always monetise it.” She inevitably has a fresh angle on her mental health challenges, like calling the self-destructive voice in her head “Hitler” so she knows not to listen to him.

As followers of Akana’s intensely personal YouTube content will know, her sister Kristina died by suicide at age 13. Her retelling of this horror finds comedy in the most unlikely places, including a hospital volunteer who bizarrely glommed onto the grieving family and the shenanigans of the funeral director who tried to upsell the family to a better coffin.

The hour culminates in a set piece focused on a truly unexpected prop and a short slide show that illustrates even the most unbelievable parts of her tale – like her elderly father volunteering to go fight in Ukraine – are true. You could call It Gets Darker an exemplar of the post-Nanette wave of trauma-flavoured comedy, but it’s a gem in its own right, a fascinating, strangely inspiring and wildly hilarious piece of storytelling.