Grim, muscular Henry 5 shows theatre artists at the top of their game

THEATRE
Henry 5 ★★★★
Bell Shakespeare, Arts Centre Melbourne, until May 25

Bell Shakespeare’s latest production is an incisive examination of war that rebels against the received ideas of Henry V, which has long been given a triumphalist, if not outright jingoistic gloss.

Business as usual would have been grotesque, given the brutal inhumanity of wars in Gaza and Ukraine, and the ghastly fact that our own most decorated war hero, Ben Roberts-Smith, was found, in a civil court case, to have committed war crimes in Afghanistan.

JK Kazzi humanises Henry V in his professional stage debut.Credit: Brett Boardman

Marion Potts directs a particularly grim and unsentimental retake, performed with muscular assurance by an impressive ensemble with a bilingual command of Shakespeare.

One stroke of inspiration is to play scenes at the French court in French with surtitles. I’ve lost count of the number of productions I’ve seen that belittle the French, sometimes through puerile mockery, with the Dauphin especially caricatured as a mincing blowhard, not to mention comically accented English that wouldn’t be out of place on an episode of ’Allo ’Allo. Not this time.

Restoring equality of language rebalances the scales and raises the stakes. There’s a full measure of dignity and desperation to Jack Halabi’s Dauphin, the French King (Jo Turner), and their loyal herald Montjoy (Mararo Wangai) defending their homeland, and the Frenchwomen in the play, too, are viewed from a fresh angle.

The cast of Bell Shakespeare’s Henry V.

The halting English lesson between Princess Catherine (Ava Madon) and her handmaiden (Odile le Clézio) is still comic, but tinged with frustration at a reality imposed and coerced, not chosen. A courtship scene with the conquering Henry exchanges typical cuteness for cringe (and sexual harassment) in a dramatic encounter much more sensitive than usual to the imbalance of power. None of this feels contrived, nor does it lessen the intensity of the English characters.

As King Henry, JK Kazzi has a restless vitality, dashing but possessed of a cracked authority that never entirely suppresses fear. The performance doesn’t turn away from the latent violence within his hollow crown, and there’s piercing horror when he orders his men to cut the throats of French prisoners – the moment the war hero turns criminal.

Although its dark side is laid bare, masculine comradeship-in-arms does lift soldiers through the unbearable ordeal of war. Alex Kirwan’s doomed Westmoreland, and Ella Prince’s staunch Exeter, inhabit an easy fraternity and deliver scene-setting speeches usually spoken by the chorus with great vividness.

Anna Tregloan’s set and costumes, Jethro Woodward’s sound, and Verity Hampson’s lighting are minimalist, uncluttered and dramatically precise. Atmospheric battle sequences, for instance, involve martial physical performance to an electronic fusillade, the ensemble spattered in dry ooze as they march and fall in dim half-light.

This is Henry V reinterpreted, so far as possible within the bounds of text, as an antiwar play, and the interrogation of its heroic template will deepen your appreciation of Shakespeare – while it showcases the creative skill and intelligence of theatre artists at the top of their game.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

DANCE
Body Corp ★★★
Northcote Town Hall, until May 25

Choreographer Sarah Aiken’s latest show has a slow, meandering quality. It’s a work of quiet sprawl – playful and poetic, ambitious but unpretentious – exploring the representation, multiplication and entanglement of diverse figures, human and otherwise.

Aiken begins with the idea that ancient stories about hybrid creatures – like centaurs and mermaids – helped our ancestors feel more connected to the world. She then brings this idea into the present, linking it to digital augmentation and virtual identities.

Sarah Aiken’s latest show explores the representation of diverse figures.

Early scenes use large video monitors to create striking collage effects. The three performers stand behind the screens, aligning their bodies with projected images. As the work progresses, these hybrids grow stranger as arms become worm-like tentacles.

Later scenes rely on analog representations of compound creatures, using comical costumes and silhouetted forms. The methods and imagery echo Aiken’s earlier works, like Make Your Life Count (2022), though here the arrangement feels more provisional.

There is some text – a rather stilted dialogue between mermaids – but it’s full of allusion and irony, and not at all explanatory. The words sort of float in the air, drifting passively about the room, waiting for the audience to make sense of them.

The work is described by Aiken as a patchwork performance, but sometimes it more nearly resembles a heap of fragments. Where’s the work that holds these heterogeneous patches together? What’s that thread of desire that binds the various parts?

Perhaps it’s better just to follow the spliced lines of association without expecting them to lead anywhere. Aiken, joined by Martin Hansen and Gemma Sattler, sustains a calm intensity throughout, lending the work its gently strange and absorbing atmosphere.

The sound design by Jannah Quill deserves special mention: a kind of Piper at the Gates of Dawn for the 21st century. It’s cosmic and pagan, evoking the presence of a circling, prancing, hoofed god, half-seen and elemental.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

MUSICAL THEATRE
Les Misérables The Arena Spectacular ★★★★
Rod Laver Arena, until May 25

Upon the release of his novel Les Misérables, an exiled Victor Hugo sent a short telegram to his publisher. It read simply, “?” and the reply, equally succinct, returned from Paris: “!” So the literary legend runs, and were I not paid by the word, it would be tempting to let that simple exchange stand as a review, too, of the musical based on Hugo’s masterwork.

A packed Rod Laver Arena on opening night is the surest indication that Les Mis remains as popular as ever, and an arena spectacular is a terrific vehicle for unleashing the soar and sweep of a show that has secured its place in the musical theatre pantheon.

Featuring orchestral splendour and roof-raising power vocals, this production transforms what could have been a static concert-style performance into something grander.Credit: Daniel Boud

Featuring orchestral splendour and roof-raising power vocals, this production transforms what could have been a static concert-style performance into something grander, emphasising the synergy of music and drama that makes Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil’s unlikely adaptation such an enduring crowd-pleaser.

Lighting does much to sculpt set-pieces in the episodic narrative, framing the moral struggle between reformed thief Jean Valjean (Alfie Boe), and his pitiless nemesis Inspector Javert (Michael Ball), in halo-like spotlights and shadows of wretchedness. It also enlivens ensemble scenes as the story swings from chain-gangs and churches to brothels and barricades (the last evoked by a wash of blood-red video art and a lighting rig swooping down from on high).

But it’s the scale of the music and song that leaves no inch of the vast auditorium untouched. Boe can belt out big notes at goosebump-inducing volume. As Valjean moves from torment into a kind of saintliness, he sends high notes heavenwards to divine effect. Ball’s Javert has the opposite trajectory, the hard purity of his zealotry cracking into hellish descent.

Les Misérables has secured its place in the musical theatre pantheon.Credit: Daniel Boud

The musical’s most famous solos are supercharged with emotion – Rachelle Ann Go’s Fantine rides the disillusionment of I Dreamed A Dream, and Shan Ako’s Eponine thrills with the fleeting illusions of unrequited love in as powerful a rendition of On My Own as I’ve heard.

James D. Gish makes a dashing would-be revolutionary, leading the rousing anthem Do You Hear the People Sing? Romantic leads Marius (Jac Yarrow) and Cosette (Beatrice Penny-Toure) etch the precarity and purity of love at first sight, and Matt Lucas and Marina Prior revel in comic villainy as the money-grubbing Thenardiers, whose corrupt machinations stand in sharp counterpoint to the tale of redemption at the show’s core.

There’s the occasional moment of unclear exposition, I suppose, but it’s quibbling to draw attention to them when the cast and the musicians combine to create a Les Mis that resounds with such epic grandeur.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

DANCE
Humans 2.0 ★★★
Arts Centre Melbourne, until May 24

Circa’s Humans 2.0 is a choreographic spectacle where acrobatics becomes a dance of life: no sequins, no gaudiness, nothing in fact that glitters except the brightness of youth catapulted into motion.

This is circus stripped to its essentials.Credit: Yaya Stempler

The Brisbane-based Circa seems to embody a distinctly Queensland aesthetic – sunny, easygoing, untroubled. Perhaps it’s only a critic’s fancy, but there’s a lightness here that suggests a more relaxed lifestyle.

In any case, this is circus stripped to its essentials – no props, or very few – just ten athletic bodies in constant contact. It’s about connection, coordination and shared effort: thinking as a group, through the body, as a body.

It’s mostly abstract, almost choric, with performers orbiting or caroming through an illuminated circle at centre stage. There’s dancerly ornamentation, and a recurring motif of twitchy flinches and warped physical forms.

Circa’s Humans 2.0 is a choreographic spectacle where acrobatics becomes a dance of life.Credit: Lesley Martin

There are moments of quiet intimacy, but artistic director Yaron Lifschitz also likes to crowd the stage, with simultaneous floor routines and overlapping sequences. The eye is often unsure where to land in the flurry of limbs.

The pacing is steady, almost relentless. One sequence flows into the next with a sense of organic continuity. The occasional flubbed trick is quickly forgotten, absorbed by the forward momentum of the ensemble.

Repeated images of lifting, catching, cradling and carrying establish the evening’s theme. Bodies support one another in moments of gymnastic exchange, culminating in striking human towers that rise and fall and rise again.

There are two specialty acts – straps (Holly-Rose Boyer) and silks (Asha Colless) – both cleanly performed, with dramatic split positions as highlights. But the real payoff comes at the end, when a trapeze descends and everyone takes a turn.

The production is slick. Relentless, bass-heavy music with clattering effects drives the action. At times, it feels distancing, even at odds with the show’s spirit: humanity absorbed into smooth-edged spectacle. Still, it’s a rewarding experience – occasionally breathtaking – and clearly resonant, continuing to draw audiences worldwide more than two years after its premiere.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

MUSICAL THEATRE
Hadestown ★★★★
Her Majesty’s Theatre, until July 6

Ancient Greek and Roman myths involving the underworld tend to agree on the ease with which mortals can find the road to hell. In Anais Mitchell’s folk-musical Hadestown – a retelling of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, draped in a distinctly American mythos and musicality – the road becomes a railway line, and Hades a pinstripe-suited robber baron, whose train ferries denizens of jazz-age speakeasies to “eternal overtime” in a factory at the end of the line.

Christine Anu as Hermes and Elenoa Rokobaro as Persephone in a scene from Hadestown.Credit: Penny Stephens

The other point on which the myths agree is how difficult the underworld is to escape. As Dryden put it in his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid:

“The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labour lies.”

We know that Orpheus will fail, that a fatal glance backward will condemn Eurydice to the underworld forever, but the tragic love story swells with every repetition and Christine Anu’s Hermes – glam emcee in this steampunk adaptation – is determined they’re going to tell it anyway.

If Hadestown is too schematic to provide much emotional depth or tragic catharsis, it is musically superior to most Broadway blockbusters. This production delivers Mitchell’s score (which started as a concept album and bloomed into a stage show) with propulsive catchiness and assurance.

It’s usually billed as a folk-musical, though the range of popular music referenced is much wider than that term suggests.

Noah Mullins as Orpheus and Eliza Soriano as Eurydice.Credit: Penny Stephens

Anu unleashes brassiness for the opening scene-setter, Road to Hell. Adrian Tamburini’s Hades has a gravelly, embittered bass with dark country vibes going on – infernal shades of Johnny Cash or Nick Cave or even Tom Waits lurking in the low notes.

Opposite him, Elenoa Rokobaro plays a Persephone loosened by moonshine, tearing up jazz and blues numbers in Dionysian style.

Noah Mullins faces the daunting vocal challenge of channelling Orpheus, a Muse’s son, whose song can charm even the lord of the underworld. Their sustained falsetto only occasionally sounds strained – a superhuman feat in itself – with the return to a mortal register catching a more anthemic sound, sometimes augmented by choric harmonies.

And Eliza Soriano covered Eurydice on opening night, playing her as a pop-punk pocket rocket so impoverished, so downtrodden by the world, that she chooses her fate. Having said that, the Fates themselves (Sarah Murr, Jennifer Trijo, Imani Williams) are such an irresistible trio vocally, such decisions are never fair.

This production of Hadestown delivers the score with propulsive catchiness and assurance.Credit: Penny Stephens

A full complement of musicians onstage thoroughly enlivens proceedings and plays to the show’s greatest strength. Featured solos from Griffin Youngs on jazz trombone are an unexpected highlight.

Some of the visual production elements and world-building are less cogent and inspired, although the doomed walk out of the underworld proves atmospheric, rendered through umbral lighting design and haze effects.

Shadows of contemporary US politics don’t quite coalesce or fit easily into the myth’s emotional logic. Hades is building a Trumpian wall, for instance, to keep poor people out of his kingdom, who knows why. Still, Hadestown doesn’t have to make sense at every level. Few musicals do, and the sweep and surge of the show’s score carries us to hell and back with conviction and charm.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

JAZZ
Lee/Dasika/Van der Schyff/Keller ★★★★
The JazzLab, May 12

Andrea Keller’s long-running Monday night residency at JazzLab allows the composer-pianist to explore new approaches, compositions and combinations of players who inspire her.

This week, Keller presented a quartet that grew out of her desire to collaborate with Peggy Lee, a remarkable Canadian cellist who is now based partly in Melbourne. Lee and her partner (drummer Dylan van der Schyff) have become valued members of this city’s jazz scene, and it’s not hard to see why. Both are equipped with supreme technical facility, coupled with a rich creative imagination that enhances any group they play with.

The group’s fourth member is trumpeter Niran Dasika, who works regularly with Keller and whose tone on his instrument is at once utterly distinctive and strikingly malleable.

On stage together, these musicians forged a sound world that was as adventurous as it was alluring. The compositions were by Lee, Dasika and Keller, but all four players became co-creators as each piece unfolded. Van der Schyff rarely held onto a regular pulse, instead suggesting it – or, at times, setting it adrift entirely – as he conjured an ever-changing field of textures and tonal effects.

Lee/Dasika/Van der Schyff/Keller at The JazzLab, May 12Credit: Roger Mitchell

Lee, Keller and Dasika were equally alive to the shifting roles their instruments could play. Lee’s cello could set up an angular strut, a sonorous undertow or a stream of unearthly harmonics. Dasika’s plaintive, achingly vulnerable lines on trumpet could fragment into a series of urgent cries, while Keller veered between tender lyricism, percussive momentum and abstract explorations inside the piano.

Some of the compositions were structurally complex, but the music never came across as coolly cerebral, and even the most demanding arrangements left plenty of room for spontaneous interaction.

Given the busy schedules of all four players, opportunities for the quartet to perform will be rare. But with a collaboration as promising and fruitful as this one, here’s hoping they can make it happen.
Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas

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