Secrets and lies laid bare in this tender two-hander

THEATRE
HEAVEN
Qtopia Sydney, The Loading Dock, May 16
Until May 31
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★½

“The one that got away” – I’ve never really liked that phrase. A bit too Wolf Creek-coded. But in Eugene O’Brien’s Heaven, a story that is both tender and aflame, the one that got away is reframed as the life one could have been lived; that secret one, in which our deepest fantasies, all those trapped and trammelled desires, keep our minds a quiet prisoner through the years. Even as age performs its brittling rituals on the body; even as the point of no return in our relationships seems long past.

Noel Hodda and Lucy Miller are the two wonderful leads in Heaven.Credit: Alex Vaughan

Desire, regret, ageing – the responsibilities we have to ourselves and those we love: these themes are braided in a series of monologues by two wonderful leads, Lucy Miller as the vixen firebrand Mairead and Noel Hodda as the sweetly square, repressed Mal.

Mairead and Mal’s marriage was passionless from the beginning, but they’ve been friends for 20 years. It takes a visit home to a crumbling Irish town for a wedding for them to reckon with what their younger selves could not.

Without any character interaction in this two-hander, and with just a long wooden bench and a shimmering black curtain comprising Caity Cowan’s Qtopia set, the strength of Heaven rests heavily upon the performance of its two leads and Kate Gaul’s compassion-driven direction. Having proven their chops many times over, it’s no surprise the actors carry their roles beautifully, with only a few patches of rushed pacing to find fault with.

Miller, founder of production company Bitchen Wolf, with which this show debuts, is a divine stage presence. Vivacious, unabashed and arch, she eats the cream of her lines and licks her fingers afterwards.

Even with her character’s vices and frailties on display – her warring relationship with her daughter, her fast submission to her body’s carnal drives – you find yourself always in her corner. It may be Mairead’s temptation in this town is “just” an old flame. But in Heaven, the all-consuming power of desire is neither underestimated nor shamed.

Greater pity though goes to poor Mal, with the troubled ticker and 50 years of repressed homosexuality, which has followed him all his life as an intense eroticisation of Christ. It’s a devastating irony, if often played to comic effect: that the icon of a religion that would cast him out returns to him again and again as an erection-causing, gentle-hearted saviour, a paradoxical figure of solace and torment.

Hodda is completely endearing in his performance, especially when Mal descends – with the help of a little nose candy – into the “underneath” realm of his repressed identity. His piping ejaculations of “Jeysus!” in his County Limerick accent is a triumph for Carmen Lysiak’s dialect coaching.

Winning a 2023 Irish Times Award for best new play, Heaven brings long-forbidden questions around love and sexuality into the light. There are so many ways we can configure relationships nowadays, after all – to meet physical needs and to create models of care. In these more open-minded times, O’Brien implies – if we have the courage – we have a little more of that sacred power to be open, to affirm and to choose.

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MUSIC
Rossini in Paris
Sydney Philharmonia Choirs
Opera House, May 17
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★½

Rossini was buried in Paris in 1868 but didn’t stay long. After nine years, Italian authorities organised for him to spend the rest of eternity in his home country and his remains were ceremoniously moved to Florence.

Yet Paris can lay claim to some of his best late compositions, notably the Petite messe solennelle (1863) – the “last mortal sin of my old age”, as Rossini described it. As many have pointed out, the mass is neither “petite” or “solemn”, particularly when presented, as conductor Brett Weymark and Sydney Philharmonia Choirs did, in the orchestral version Rossini was persuaded to create from its modest original, but which he never heard.

Brett Weymark brought Rossini’s large-canvas work vividly to life.Credit: Keith Saunders

In this form, the mass is a varied and powerful concert work, (Rossini unsuccessfully requested papal permission for female singers in liturgical performance). It certainly doesn’t need padding out, but Weymark erred on the side of generosity and preceded it with highlights from Act 1 of Rossini’s other great Parisian triumph, his last opera, William Tell (1829).

Apart from its emblematically Rossinian Overture, the music of William Tell is rare on Sydney stages, and these excerpts provided an opportunity to hear the rich and imposing choruses of scenes 1, 2 and 11 sung with a much larger choir than any opera company could afford, and to sample some of the ensembles between.

Celeste Lazarenko and Ashlyn Tymms created subtly coloured blends in the roles of Jeremy (Tell’s son) and Hedwige (Tell’s wife). In the duet between Tell and Arnold, Nathan Lay (Tell) sang with even strength, and Shanul Sharma (Arnold) had an attractive light sound. Leon Vitogiannis took the role of the venerable elder Melchthal with a young, well-edged baritone and Elias Wilson, sang Rodolphe, Captain of the Guard, with well-textured but subdued finish.

The Kyrie of the mass began with sombre instrumental and choral entries in overlaid dissonance, cutting back to unaccompanied liturgical style for the Christe. At the conclusions of the Gloria and Credo sections, the assembled choirs, filling the southern, eastern and western galleries around the Opera House stage, maintained creditable balance and cohesion while providing a stirring boost in energy.

Sharma rose to climactic strength in the Domine Deus section and Lazarenko and Tymms combined with glowing tenderness in the Qui Tollis. Lay sang the Quoniam with lines of well-shaped firmness. In the Prelude Religieux, organist David Drury drew out the colours of the Opera House’s Ronald Sharp-designed organ with nuance and subtlety.

Lazarenko returned in the O Salutaris with bright sound, charm and tapered phrases, while Tims displayed a richly expressive tone in the Agnus Dei. Despite the ambition of the undertaking, Weymark coordinated the Sydney Philharmonia Orchestra, choirs and soloists to bring the details of this large-canvas work vividly to life.

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Stephen Hough performs Brahms
Sydney Symphony Orchestra May 18
★★★★½
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM

Pianist Stephen Hough wrestled with the tempestuous Olympianism of the first movement of Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Opus 15, with steely fingers, phlegmatic calm and musical wisdom.

He avoided any of the distractions indulgently Romantic playing can bring and allowed the expressiveness of the ideas to speak for themselves, all the while keeping the large-scale structure taut and strong.

Musical wisdom characterised Stephen Hough’s performance.Credit: Craig Abercrombie

When it came to the finale, he drove its contrapuntal spikiness with insistent rigour, relaxing during the simpler episodes but opening out in the recapitulation to create culminating moments of surging power.

Yet it was the slow movement that became the still turning point of the entire work. After bassoon and strings established a mood of quiet exultancy and peace amid intense reflection, Hough quietened the theme with which the piano enters even further and then further again in the cascading triplets which undulate down as though coming back to earth after a moment of revelation. This was a performance of cogency, strength and musical mastery.

The concert was also an opportunity to welcome back guest conductor Elim Chan and the focused and energised engagement she brings to each score. The program opened with the premier of Iain Grandage’s LiFT, written for the orchestra’s brass section.

It started with the rapidly repeated notes on trumpet traditionally used in fanfares to convey the impression that something important is about to happen. But the motives quickly sprang new shoots, appearing in slower notes and walking in broader strides in the lower instruments as though torn between haste and speed. It proceeded in irregular, overlapping fragments to create an impression of efflorescent excitement and expectancy.

What followed was a selection from the two orchestra suites that Prokofiev made from his 1938 ballet Romeo and Juliet, which Chan led with exacting alertness, drawing out the strikingly original, modernist shades Prokofiev created in his orchestration.

The opening excerpt, Montagues and Capulets moved quickly from ominous foreboding to catastrophe and the second excerpt, a portrait of Juliet the Young Girl danced between nimble lightness and soulful reflection.

Masks hinted at mysterious colours, the mood of the whole maintaining a hint of menace. In the sixth excerpt, Death of Tybolt, the SSO strings, under concertmaster Andrew Haveron, scurried with deathly precision and vivid cross-jabs. With recent changes, and a mixture of new appointments and experienced players in the wind section, the SSO remains in strong shape, capable of cutting to the essence with inspiring impact.