Meet the Jane Austen who confessed to writing with a hangover

This wrap of shows around Melbourne includes a lively look into the mind of Jane Austen, Macbeth transported to the 1920s, a sold-out performance by Polish composer-pianist Hania Rani, the seventh gig in an 11-consecutive-night run by Mudhoney, a must-see show for anyone who loves the percussive pleasures of tap, and a play that shines a light on those forced to flee their homelands as refugees.

THEATRE
By Jane’s Hand ★★★½
La Mama Courthouse, Until May 7

A brief and whimsical divertissement to gladden the hearts of Janeites, this show splices Jane Austen’s letters, scenes from Pride and Prejudice, and a rather brilliant selection of songs chosen from the author’s private music collection.

A scene from By Jane’s Hand at La Mama. Credit: Darren Gill

Three performers (Olivia O’Brien, Marjorie Butcher, Isha Menon) in faux-Regency gowns tag-team the voice of Austen. With snippets from the letters bookending the piece, this is done to lively choric effect and tends to enhance rather than compromise intimacy.

The sense is one of immersion in a sharp mind flashing by us. And yes, there are endless balls, astute and often acerbic observations on the character and appearance of those she meets, and droll remarks on social pecking order – the stuff of the novels.

But there are glimpses, too, of another Jane – one who confessed to writing with a hangover, or who was thrown into a panic when, in 1798, she almost lost her writing box (together with her worldly wealth of £7) after it was placed by mistake on a horse-drawn chaise heading for Dover.

It makes you wonder, given many of her 3000 missives were destroyed by her family, what the author might have written in her most unguarded moments.

By Jane’s Hand offers a lively insight into the life and mind of Jane Austen.Credit: Darren Gill

Lightning excerpts from Pride and Prejudice are likewise shared, with alternating narration and fulsome comic caricatures of the male roles. The odious Mr Collins is an especially grotesque patriarchal lampoon, with Mr Darcy rehearsed and readjusted to find just the right shade of resentment.

While the acting doesn’t attempt much nuance, musical refinement makes up for it. All performers are trained musicians, and the many songs interwoven throughout feature harp, keyboard, violin, and other instruments, as well as some delightful a cappella roundelays and harmonies.

These include jauntily arranged and ornamented children’s rhymes (you’ll never hear Hot Cross Buns or Goosey Goosey Gander the same way again), rousing folk and drinking songs, and more melancholy fare such as Haydn’s She Never Told Her Love, set to immortal lines from Twelfth Night.

By Jane’s Hand embodies the spirit of the amateur in the best sense – the performance is constructed almost as a transient shrine to the love of Austen’s work – and it doesn’t waste a moment of your time. Fans should enjoy it immensely.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE
Macbeth ★★
Bell Shakespeare, Arts Centre Melbourne, until May 14

Superstition surrounds the Scottish play, though even if everyone involved in this Bell Shakespeare production had refused euphemism and screamed “Macbeth!” from the tops of their lungs 1000 times, it would hardly account for so doomed a version as this.

No supernatural power is at work. What invites the curse of black comedy is a tainted succession of ill-advised artistic choices.

There’s nothing wrong with setting Macbeth in the 1920s, with framing it through a seance and the eldritch trappings of early 20th century spiritualism, or indeed the haunting religious music which opens the show. It’s all viable design.

A scene from Bell Shakespeare’s production of Macbeth.Credit: Brett Boardman

Before long, however, foreboding and a sense of impending humiliation settle over the central role. Hazem Shammas’ incarnation of Macbeth belongs in the Richard III ward of Monty Python’s Hospital for Over-Acting. By interval, you half-expect a nurse with chloroform to walk in, and it boggles the mind that director Peter Evans could let it become so cartoonish.

The effect is weirder given some measured and effective performances.

Jessica Tovey’s Lady Macbeth wields a formidable and (despite the invocation of malevolent spirits to “unsex” her) distinctly feminine power. The intimate first scene of passion and manipulation could’ve set the stage for an intricate portrayal of the couple’s genuine, if psychologically co-dependent, love, but the spell and their bond is too soon broken.

Allowing Macbeth to ignore his wife, shirtfront the audience, and linger endlessly on – “If we fail?” – seems to rupture their onstage connection. It never recovers.

Jessica Tovey’s Lady Macbeth wields a formidable and distinctly feminine power.Credit: Brett Boardman

Julia Billington plays Banquo with more than a shadow of Macbeth’s ambition and capacity for deceit – an interesting interpretation – the early warning to Macbeth about the witches muttered here as an aside to the audience. A plainly sketched authority suffuses Jeremi Campese’s Malcolm, though the part is drastically curtailed. James Lugton recedes as Duncan but careens into comedy as the drunken Porter.

That should be the play’s funniest moment, disarming us before horrors unfold. But it’s hard to suppress a smirk at the camp spectacle of witches shouting their lines amid smoke machines and reverberant sound staging, and Shammas leaves himself nowhere to turn that isn’t stalked by the inappropriate silhouette of the clown.

It’s a strategic error to over-emote early on as Macbeth.

Fear and paranoia drive the character, but you don’t want to be literally throwing yourself around the stage by the banquet scene.

Besides, Macbeth isn’t a narcissistic monster like Richard III – he has a conscience, he’s capable of love, he knows exactly what he’s doing to himself as he wades into atrocity – that’s part of the tragedy.

Shammas delivers an unhinged, almost gleefully vicious tyrant rather than a war hero who succumbs to moral corruption and a creeping desensitisation to violence. He also channels uncontrolled distress that stretches the verse to the point of medieval torture: “Let this daaay stand aaaye accuuuursed in the calendaaaaaaaar!”

A lone moment of restraint prevails when Macbeth learns of his wife’s death. It’s striking, but also increases puzzlement at the vein-popping excess. If Shammas were more willing to trust in the words to do their dramatic work, to trust in the audience’s imagination to complete the performance, his Macbeth might have had greater emotional impact.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

JAZZ
Hania Rani ★★★★
Melbourne Recital Centre, April 28

It’s been just four years since Polish composer-pianist Hania Rani released her debut album, but her star has been rising at a meteoric pace ever since. Her subsequent recordings – and mesmerising live shows – have seen her introduce synthesisers, loops, vocals and electronic effects.

There was a sold-out crowd for a performance by Polish composer-pianist Hania Rani.Credit: Aleksandra Zaborowska

Nils Frahm is an obvious reference point, but Rani’s influences range far and wide, from minimalism to jazz and EDM. The approach she has developed is deeply personal, anchored by her early classical training but propelled by her curiosity and ceaseless desire to explore.

Such was the interest in the Rani’s first visit to Australia that her show at the Melbourne Recital Centre on Friday was a sell-out. The concert featured works from her recordings along with newer, unreleased material, each piece woven into the next to create a hypnotic – and at times dreamlike – journey. Adding to the sense of theatre was the dramatic lighting, with hazy pulsations or horizontal streaks that fanned out across the stage to shower celestial confetti onto the walls and ceiling.

Often, Rani was ensconced in shadows or visible only in silhouette. Having watched her concerts (with multiple camera angles) online, I longed to see her more clearly on stage. To see her fingers as they hammered percussively or built rhapsodic, heart-swelling cascades. To see her eyes closed and her body sway as she improvised over layers of rhythmic arpeggios. To see the focused intensity as she hunched over her synths, adding fuzzy granular motifs that looped beneath her ethereal vocals even as she moved stealthily from one keyboard to another.

Still, it was impossible not to be captivated by the cinematic sweep of the music. And when Rani farewelled us with a wistful melody at her upright piano, we were left with a sense of intimacy and human connection worth more than a thousand illuminated stars.
Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas

MUSIC
Mudhoney ★★★★
Northcote Social Club, April 26

Mudhoney perform at Northcote Social Club on April 26, 2023.Credit: Rick Clifford

After being away for nine years, Mudhoney have marked their return to Australia with an ambitious and packed schedule of performances, playing 11 consecutive nights on a tour that has expanded to 17 dates around the country.

Seven sold-out shows in Victoria alone, where the band first played in 1990, made these masters of Seattle super fuzz one of the hottest tickets in town. For grunge music fans, it’s been a week to proudly pull out their flannelette shirts and crank up precious old vinyl albums.

Thirty-five years after emerging from the ashes of mid-1980s band Green River (also from Seattle), Mudhoney this month released their 11th studio album, Plastic Eternity. The band’s debut EP Superfuzz Bigmuff was released a year before their debut album, in 1988.

Exactly how Mark Arm’s vocal cords have survived decades of operating in overdrive is anybody’s guess.Credit: Rick Clifford

Here Comes the Flood and Almost Everything off the new album slotted in sweetly among earlier songs, including Let It Slide and The Farther I Go, the latter opening the show to howls of delight from a tightly packed crowd.

Lead vocalist Mark Arm’s own distinctive howls quickly ramped up the energy levels, while guitarist Steve Turner hooked into the fuzzy intro of Touch Me I’m Sick like it was the golden era of grunge all over again.

Exactly how Arm’s vocal cords have survived decades of operating in overdrive is anybody’s guess, but he’s revelling in the band’s new material, including the Iggy Pop-esque new tune Little Dogs.

Arm has a hypnotising presence on stage, despite saying very little between songs. And with drummer Dan Peters and Melbourne-based Guy Maddison on bass guitar, there’s little room for banter anyway.

It’s a pedal-to-the-metal trip down memory lane, with detours to new tracks, including Move Under and Souvenir Of My Trip.

Support band Seminal Rats were one of several local bands Mudhoney requested for this tour.

Fronted by vocalist Michael Harley, the veteran Melbourne rockers first played in 1984, but wound the clock back with a nostalgic, at times wonky, set including Truth Never Lies and Rat Race from their 1986 album, Omnipotent.
Reviewed by Martin Boulton

Mudhoney headline Cherry Rock 2023, Little Collins Street, Melbourne, on Sunday, April 30.

DANCE
The Tap Pack ★★★
Comedy Theatre, until April 30

The globetrotting song-and-dance troupe known as the Tap Pack have returned, bringing their guileless family-friendly fusion of tap and tailored suits to Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre for a lightning weekend season.

The show sticks close to the established Tap Pack formula: a quintet of amply talented Aussie blokes perform tap routines and sing contemporary pop hits and classic swing numbers such as the Sinatra standards The Lady is a Tramp and One for My Baby.

It’s a brisk and very compact production. There’s a fair bit of awkward banter among the performers and a few cheery reflections on dance and the attractions of the stage, but there’s no elaborate storyline to slow things down. You’ll be back on the street in less than 90 minutes.

The focus is squarely on the quality of the dance and the singing, which is – happily – very high. This version of the pack features regular tap rats Jesse Rasmussen, Jordan Pollard, Thomas J Egan and Ben Brown, with local crooner Thomas McGuane on hand for the Melbourne shows.

The Tap Pack are a must-see for anyone who loves the percussive pleasures of tap.Credit: The Tap Pack

Rasmussen does his crowd-pleasing impressions of Sammy Davis Jr, Fred Astaire and the penguin from Happy Feet. And there’s a wonderful, improvised, unaccompanied beast of a solo in two parts performed by Brown, which sprawls across the stage and mesmerises with its intensity.

The big group dance numbers, however, are the main attraction: from the high-energy opening number, to the bottle-juggling mess of the mixed drinks routine, to the hand-clapping, stair-stomping finale.

Tap Pack is still a must-see for anyone who loves the percussive pleasures of tap. The show is a genuine celebration of the art form, and the performers are some of the best in the business. There’s also a more than serviceable quartet of live musicians, led by Stefan Nowak on keyboards.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

THEATRE
Selling Kabul ★★★
by Sylvia Khoury, Red Stitch, until May 21

Sylvia Khoury’s Selling Kabul takes place in 2013, but it depicts so urgently the perils faced by Afghans who assisted occupying forces during the 2001-2021 war, you may initially think it was set on the eve of the chaotic withdrawal of US-led troops from Kabul in 2021.

Farhad Zaiwala, Khisraw Jones-Shukoor, Claudia Greenstone in a scene from Selling Kabul.Credit: Jodie Hutchinson

Cooped up in the apartment of his sister Afiya (Nicole Nabout), Taroon (Khrisraw Jones-Shukoor) is in hiding from Taliban thugs. His life is in imminent danger. Having accompanied US troops as translator and guide, his name is on a hit list, and, without internet access, he can’t discover whether his promised US protection visa has been granted.

Taroon is desperate to escape his hiding-place for another reason. His wife has just given birth to their first child, and he plans to dress in a burqa (or chadaree) to visit them in hospital without being caught, before the three of them are spirited abroad to safety.

As they await the arrival of Afiya’s husband Jawid (Farhad Zaiwala) – whose business dealings with the Taliban buy him some tentative protection – chatterbox neighbour Leyla (Claudia Greenstone) appears … and is later drawn helplessly into lethal intrigue as tension escalates, violence erupts, and Taroon is forced to flee Afghanistan that very night.

Nicole Nabout and Claudia Greenstone star in the tense Selling Kabul.Credit: Jodie Hutchinson

Claustrophobic tedium and anxiety baseline a thriller-like plot which rises to an anguished pitch of heightened emotion. The characters face unenviable, life-or-death decisions, and there are often no good choices.

Nabout’s Afiya is a fiercely protective but self-abnegating presence: her entire being consumed to a fault by helping those she loves to survive. She is also educated – the best English-speaker in the family – though as she remarks bitterly, it doesn’t bring freedom, remaining little more than “party trick” for American soldiers.

Taroon, for his part, grows to question both his motives for, and the price of, helping the occupation, with Jones-Shukoor channelling an almost comically caged vitality as tragedy and horror accumulate. Opposite him, Zaiwala’s wonderfully modest, subtle, and introspective Jawid lends the interrogation of courage and cowardice a grave moral complexity.

Whether this is an accurate portrayal of life in occupied Kabul – and there are melodramatic flourishes (not to mention Australian accents) which strain to convey it realistically – seems less important than that the attempt to imagine it exists.

Aside from alleged war crimes committed by Australian troops, we get scant news about Afghanistan, and this play might inspire you to discover how dire the situation is for ordinary people under Taliban rule.

Afiya would not be educated in Kabul today. She would not be allowed to work. The UN estimates two thirds of the population requires humanitarian assistance, and it has threatened to pull out of the country next month if the Taliban edict banning aid organisations from employing local women isn’t lifted.

Are we complicit in all this? What can we do? At the very least, we have a responsibility not to look away, to insist that Australia meets its international obligations to those – like some of the characters in this play – forced to flee their homelands as refugees.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead