David Williamson’s discordant family tale delivers ‘supernova’ performance

THEATRE
Aria
Ensemble Theatre, January 29
Until March 15
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★½

Imagine a family gathering where you actually say what you think. When, instead of smiling politely as your mother-in-law makes acidic comments, or your spouse casually undermines you, or your sibling rewrites history in their favour, you speak your truth. Imagine the chaos. Imagine the glory!

Tracy Mann plays diva Monique in David Williamson’s latest play Aria.Credit: Prudence Upton

This universal fantasy of family retribution plays out in veteran Australian playwright David Williamson’s latest play. Aria is set at an annual gathering for the birthdays of Monique’s three sons.

Monique is the family matriarch, undiminished by age and widowhood, and the party follows a well-trodden path: champagne, sparkling conversation, more champagne, a speech, whisky and regrets, culminating in a shaky operatic aria from Monique, who should have been the next Maria Callas, had she not sacrificed all for motherhood.

Monique’s children represent a colourful parade of the sort of warts-and-all characters we’ve come to expect from Williamson: the wannabe pollie with an inflated sense of his own significance, and his doormat partner; the apologetic also-ran married to a straight-talking lawyer; and the cheeky younger son who has traded up to a trophy wife.

Tracy Mann, as Monique, bristles and jangles and steals every scene she is in.Credit: Prudence Upton

Aria mixes and matches these characters over a tight 70 minutes of sextets, trios, duos and a couple of mighty solos.

It’s great material: Williamson is to be congratulated for writing four chunky and playful female roles which, although built on stereotypes, offer the actors a rare platform to let rip. The cast, nimbly directed by Janine Watson, enjoy themselves with, in particular, Tamara Lee Bailey delivering some withering one-liners.

Suzannah McDonald pulls off chronic overwhelm with grace, and Danielle King, as Judy, finally takes bait with eloquent brevity. The sons – Sam O’Sullivan, Jack Starkey-Gill and Rowan Davie – tread largely predictable territory with unspectacular efficiency.

All six, however, are utterly out-dazzled by the supernova around which they orbit. Tracy Mann, as Monique, bristles and jangles and steals every scene she is in – and some she isn’t. Her barbs are finely honed and always reach their mark, and she stalks the stage (in a pitch-perfect costume by Rose Montgomery) with the twitchy elegance of a murderous tiger.

The aria Der Hölle Rache, sung by the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Magic Flute, is a fitting climax to her role, a fabulous tirade of bile-soused recriminations turned, with filigree madness, into art. Mann navigates the aria with show-stopping sizzle and just the right amount of waywardness as Sam O’Sullivan pursues her on piano. Williamson’s stage directions call for the performance to be met by embarrassed silence from the family but, of course, she gets a huge round of applause from the audience.

It’s a moment that for me crystalises the disturbing undercurrent of this piece: that outrage, even when it’s off-key and out of tempo, is audience catnip. As the lights fade to black, Monique is already rewriting her triumph. Say what you really think, the more extravagantly the better, and then wait for the cheers. Scary.

MUSIC
Amyl and the Sniffers
Hordern Pavilion, January 25
Reviewed by KAYLA OLAYA
★★★★½

Amyl and the Sniffers is the band name you wish you’d thought of, and Amy Taylor, the lead singer you dream about.

Taylor’s electric, raspy and shrill voice goes perfectly with her on-stage persona – an X-rated Barbie doll on magic mushrooms – complemented further by the fervour and grit of her onstage bandmates. They make crude, uninhibited Aussie pub rock at its finest.

Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers performing at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne on January 24.Credit: Richard Clifford

In the middle of the set, Taylor looked out to the crowd in a rare moment of silence between songs. “How the girls doing? Ready to get some swear words up in that gob?” she asked, before the band launched into hit song Jerkin’.

“You’re a dumb c—-, you’re an arsehole/Every time you talk, you mumble, grumble/Need to wipe your mouth after you speak/’Cause it’s an arsehole, bum hole” and so on.

The crowd roared and banged their heads every time the intro of a song from their latest album, Cartoon Darkness, struck its first beats.

Beer flew to the rioting chorus of It’s Mine while the distinct smell of a certain herb was ever-present. Hertz, with its chorus chant of “Take me to the beach, take me to the country”, reverberated throughout the room, an Aussie anthem in full flight.

Amyl & The Sniffers in action in Melbourne on January 24.Credit: Richard Clifford

An album fave and the band’s most poppy tune, Chewing Gum, further intoxicated the crowd, while the spiritual Guided by Angels had patrons screaming along.

Taylor was very much the ’80s beauty queen, in an insane black-latex corset and lace-up white booty shorts, and in her signature make-up: pastel blue eyeshadow, piled-on hot pink blush and coral lipstick.

While she jumped up and down or swished around her voluminous bleach-blonde hair, her bandmates – most of whom were shirtless, beer guts out, covered in old-school tattoos – rocked on, lapping up her energy.

There was some political commentary, with Taylor encouraging the audience to protest Invasion Day, among other comments such as “F--- Donald Trump” from bassist Gus Romer, all met with rowdy approval.

It was the type of concert where you just wanted to get up on stage and bang your head with the band.

I only wished it all took place in a venue a little more intimate than the Hordern to really lather up in the rock sensation that is Amyl and the Sniffers.

OPERA
La Traviata
Opera House Joan Sutherland Theatre, January 23
Until March 27
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★★

After cheers at the close and a sense of excited expectancy, while the cast assembled, a sizeable part of the audience leapt instantly to their feet when the curtain rose for the final bow. When Samantha Clarke, who had just sung a luminous, deeply human Violetta, finally returned to stage, many of those still seated followed suit.

Ji-Min Park as Alfredo and Samantha Clarke as Violetta in La Traviata.Credit: Guy Davies

Clarke triumphed in this role last year when this coolly austere, clear-lined production by Sarah Giles replaced the much-loved opulent and venerable version of La Traviata created by the late Elijah Moshinsky. That the reception was even stronger this year owed much to the masterly pacing of conductor Johannes Fritzsch (which in no way diminishes the achievement of Jessica Cottis at the premiere).

Fritzsch’s tempos were always judicious and unhurried, supported by a deeply felt pulse and scrupulous attention to detail that allowed for a rare blend of gratifying precision and expressive flexibility between stage and pit.

In this context, the voices were able to blossom with glorious natural colour without distortion or any sense of frenetic breathlessness. In Violetta’s great three-movement aria from Act 1, Ah, fors’e lui che l’anima, Clarke unfolded the conflicting emotions with rich, vivid colour, sculpting the lines and embellishment for their expressiveness and charm, completely unblemished by hints of shrieking display, while Fritzsch and the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra supported with discreet transparent clarity.

As her lover Alfredo, Ji-Min Park sang with a totally different kind of strength, the vibrato robust, the edge firm but without harshness or strain. His aria at the opening of Act 2 carried smooth lyricism. Jose Carbo as the initially stern patriarch Giorgio also bloomed wonderfully under Fritzsch’s unhurried tempos, creating warm depth and noble arcs of expressiveness.

Samantha Clarke as Violetta Valery and the Opera Australia Chorus.Credit: Keith Saunders

Clarke and Carbo jointly made their psychologically complex Act 2 scene, in which each finds a deep need for connection with the other, a touching high point. In the climactic scene in Act 2, where the beguiling melody first heard in the overture returns for a single appearance, Park created a persona of amiable obliviousness while Clarke erupted in a moment of overwhelming intensity.

Angela Hogan as Flora, Violetta’s confidante, mixed effervescence and vocal focus, and the other support roles (Richard Anderson as a resplendent but brutish Barone Douphol, Shane Lowrencev as the gentle Doctor Grenvil, Catherine Bouchier as Annina, Virgilio Marino as Gastone and Luke Gabbedy as the Marquis) had both vocal and theatrical strength.

Charles Davis’ set, with lighting by Paul Jackson, neatly partitions frivolous public and sordid private activity in Act 1, reality and ideal in Act 2, and the present life and the next in Act 3. The Opera Australia Chorus cavorted seedily and sang with forceful cohesion, particularly as they watched dancers choreographed by Allie Graham in an ingenious reverse-mode performance in Act 2.

Musically and dramatically, this is Opera Australia’s strongest Sydney presentation in the past two years and shows a welcome return to form.

MUSIC
The Cage Project
Carriageworks, January 24
Reviewed by PETER MCCALLUM
★★★★½

In 1938, American composer John Cage started using a ‘prepared piano’ in dance pieces, placing objects such as bolts, screws, felt, rubber and coins between the strings to give each note a distinct and individual timbre.

With refinement, this led, in the mid-1940s, to a remarkable cycle of Sonatas and Interludes (16 sonatas, four interludes) for prepared piano, which has become one of his most enduring works for its quiet, variegated sound world.

Distinctive rhythms rotate through each piece, like ideas that emerge and depart during meditation. For The Cage Project, conceived by Musica Viva’s artistic director Paul Kildea and Matthias Schack-Arnott, pianist Cedric Tiberghien gave a still, immaculately nuanced performance of the Sonatas and Interludes, articulated with the same superb ear, impeccable control and mastery that he brings to Debussy and Ravel.

Pianist Cedric Tiberghien gives a still, immaculately nuanced performance of the Sonatas and Interludes.

Tiberghien performed on the prepared piano beneath a suspended structure of carefully balanced booms created by Schack-Arnott, each boom supporting small electrical devices attached to woodblocks, pipes, gongs and skins, which were calibrated to the 48 prepared piano strings.

The small devices were activated by the notes Tiberghien played to produce delicate complimentary echoes in a way that seemed random though, I understand, was carefully pre-scored.

Tiberghien’s performance started with the prepared piano sound alone, and, as the ear adjusted to its remote strangeness, quiet echoes from the array above were subtly introduced, so discreetly that one only became aware of them gradually.

At about the seventh sonata, a set of floor lights drew visual attention to the array, and at about the tenth, the booms started slowly rotating at varying speeds (controlled by small fans on the end of each) so that the piano sound was slowly orbited by a constellation of occasionally twinkling sonic points above.

The aural contributions from the array became more active from about the fourteenth sonata and slowly died away at the close, leaving the last sonata to Tiberghien almost alone.

Cage’s sonatas are all in two or three parts, with each part repeated. As composer Pierre Boulez noted, this gives them a deliberately simple, pre-classical structure - like the sonatas of Scarlatti, where a numerical process was used to subvert mental habits that tend to the musical cliches that Cage wanted to avoid.

This unique project was superbly and sensitively executed, respecting and never interfering with Cage’s conception while also adding an extra dimension that subtly complemented its aesthetic and philosophical intent.

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