By John Shand, Peter McCallum, Harriet Cunningham and Kate Prendergast
Masterclass
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
January 12
Until January 16
Reviewed by Harriet Cunningham
★★★★
Dublin-based Feidlim Cannon and New York-based Adrienne Truscott first met at Sydney Festival in 2015. Masterclass is a direct result of that collision and, as the name suggests, it’s a virtuoso display of subversive theatre-making.
It starts from a common trope, an up-close-and-personal interview with the great male artist. That’s certainly what the tweed jacket and breathlessly fawning introduction from Feidlim Cannon, of Dublin-based Brokentalkers, conveys. And then, right on cue, in walks Adrienne Truscott complete with broad shoulders and unruly facial hair. The Master, like a cross between Woody Allen and Tom Cruise, has arrived.
Masterclass: ‘It’s courageous, it’s uncomfortable. And it’s just a play, isn’t it?’Credit:
So far so good: the audience sits back, in on the joke, ready to howl with laughter as Cannon and Truscott take aim at the sacred cows of culture and toxic masculinity. But don’t get too comfortable, because it is not long before this whipsmart two-hander veers into anarchy.
Nothing is sacred in Masterclass: not gender, nor talent, nor theatre. Definitely not theatre. One of the show’s delights is its unflinching send-up of itself. The wigs are preposterous, the stock sound effects arrive with a wink, and a mid-show dance number is knowingly cliched – hilarious in spite of itself. Plus all their observations are delivered with a finely honed comic timing that is a marvel of choreography in itself. Dangerous ideas, however, can get only so far powered by satire. Real struggle demands real pain.
Feidlim Cannon in Masterclass.Credit:
As Truscott’s character says, “It’s the actor’s job to be courageous and that can be unpleasant. I’m only going to choke you for thirty seconds.” This while sitting on Cannon’s chest, with hands on his throat as Cannon makes I’m-being-strangled noises. It’s a thoroughly entertaining display of testerical bombast but no one dies – it’s just a play. Then Truscott rips off the moustache and turns on Cannon. The wigs are off.
Not to give too much away, but this is the point where the show takes a meta turn that shifts it from a slapstick send-up to something closer to a Marina Abramovic happening. Truscott prosecutes her case for the rebalancing of power dynamics on stage and off with an acuity that rips Cannon into petulant shreds, while the audience becomes witness to a revolution. It’s courageous, it’s uncomfortable. And it’s just a play, isn’t it?
THEATRE
TIDDAS
Belvoir St Theatre, January 14
Until January 28
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★½
There was a play to be mined from Anita Heiss’s novel Tiddas, but this is not it. It’s Heiss’s first play, and in turning her 350-page book into a 90-minute play, she makes the novice’s mistake of failing to free herself from the original structure.
Tiddas (“sisters”) tells of the intersecting lives of five Mudgee women who have moved to Brisbane, share a book club and are turning 40. There’s Aboriginal Izzy, a semi-celebrity ambitious for her own TV show (and unexpectedly pregnant), white Veronica, who’s devoted her life to her sons, only to have her husband leave her, Aboriginal Xanthe who’d give anything for a baby, white Nadine, a successful novelist whose lover is a bottle, and Aboriginal Ellen, who uses tradies for more than odd jobs.
Anita Heiss on set of Tiddas with cast from left to right, Perry Mooney, Roxanne McDonald, Anna McMahon, Sean Dow, Lara Croydon and Jade Lomas-Ronan.Credit: Dean Sewell
In the novel, the round-robin book clubs expertly delineate these characters and their stories, which are primarily about partners and children rather than careers. We learn of certain bilateral tensions and bonds, and we come to like all five, whether for their sharp tongues or soft natures.
On stage, though, these multiple iterations of the club result in a stream of fleeting scenes, in which often neither character nor plot progresses. In fact, the actors spend inordinate time trooping on and trooping off again, like some bungled military exercise.
Directors Nadine McDonald-Dowd and Roxanne McDonald can share some blame for not finding more fluid solutions, but ultimately Heiss may have been better writing radically fewer scenes, and building more tension within them. As it is, the flashpoints seem contrived, not helped by some implausible acting.
McDonald, however, excels as Xanthe’s grandma and Izzy’s mum, acting with an understatement otherwise largely missing. Perry Moony would be a fine Ellen if she projected more. Lara Croydon misses some of Izzy’s flair, Jade Lomas-Ronan works too hard at Xanthe, and Anna McMahon overacts whenever Veronica becomes temperamental. Sean Dow, meanwhile, can’t quite meet the challenge of playing five different men.
The cause wasn’t advanced by Louise Brehmer, who was to have played Nadine, contracting COVID, and McDonald-Dowd having to cover, script in hand. The saving graces are Heiss’s wit (Ellen, for instance, is “reno-dating”), Zoe Rouse’s book-lined set, and a strong sense of the camaraderie the women share as tiddas.
CABARET
IT’S A SIN: SONGS OF LOVE AND SHAME
Wharf 1 Theatre
January 12
Until January
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★★
Seeing him up there fabulously belting out Suburbia you’d think destiny always had the spotlight ready for Michael Griffiths. The Adelaide cabaret king’s new show is a tribute to the under-sung salvation of pop music and in particular The Pet Shop Boys; and to the Wonder Woman-loving, Christian-raised South Australian kid who couldn’t get enough of the electronic duo’s wistful sounds and all-too-relatable lyrics.
Now edging 50 (though with a decades-defying complexion and pep), Griffiths came of age when West End Girls was on the radio, the AIDS Grim Reaper was on TV and to be gay was tacitly understood as a sentence of lifelong humiliation and early death. Griffiths found himself shocked when Neil Tennant, one half of PSB, outed himself in the nineties; he hadn’t really let himself believe that anyone who was actually gay could achieve their dreams.
Michael Griffiths delivers an effortless performance full of spontaneous asides. Credit:
Effortlessly commanding the keyboard, Griffiths sings and wittily annotates a curated PSB catalogue that maps against the bumpy but blessed arc of his life. Backed by Julian Ferraretto on fiddle and Dylan Paul’s thumping double bass, we hear about his unsuccessful attempt to run away from home; the time he first held hands with a man; and how that man became the love of his life.
Running as an undercurrent, Griffiths asks his audience to look beyond the rigid and high-stakes heteronormative rules that define most relationships. Then, in the final crowd-pleasing minutes, he invites his partner Daryl to come on stage and join him on piano for Heart.
Beyond what’s written, the main delight of It’s a Sin is Griffiths the man, especially his spontaneous asides. It’s the pleasure of witnessing a consummate yet self-aware show-off do his thing – unscripted, irrepressible, hilarious.
Directed by Dean Bryant, this one-night delight is an uplifting and wickedly entertaining journey through a catchy track list. For many in the crowd, it will have served as an aperitif for Mardi Gras – when Griffiths makes his Sydney return.
Orpheus & Eurydice
Opera Australia, Sydney Festival, Opera Queensland and Circa
Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House, January 12.
Until January 31
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★
The first two productions of Opera Australia’s 2024 season, La Traviata and now Orpheus & Eurydice, have both been co-presentations with Opera Queensland, adding a new twist to Barry Humphries’ waspish quip, “Australia is the Brisbane of the world”.
On the basis of the energy and new perspectives displayed by each, that would be no bad thing. This mesmerising production by Yaron Lifschitz replaces the traditional dance element of Gluck’s first “reform” opera, Orpheus & Eurydice (1762), with graceful, gasp-inducing physical theatre from the Circa Ensemble, creating a vivid, shadowy psychodrama behind Orpheus’s journey into hell.
The strange figures dressed in flesh tones and flaming red by costume designer Libby McDonnell are intimately familiar.Credit: Keith Saunders
While countertenor Christophe Dumeax sings of loss and loneliness with arresting tonal purity, strange intimately familiar figures, clad in flesh tones and flaming red by costume designer Libby McDonnell, and strikingly lit by Alexander Berlage, loom, lurch and lunge with the hyperreal logic of dreams.
The danger, of course, is that this succession of heart-stopping moments upstages Gluck’s score, which is conceived as a model of classical balance and restraint built on simple clarity of melodic line. That is mitigated here by the strength of Dumeaux’s musical and dramatic presence, the careful integration of physical and musical elements (in which Dumeaux had his own share of perilous routines), and by endowing the acrobatics with artistic purpose.
The acrobatic elements are never allowed to overwhelm Gluck’s music.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone
Early on, the audience applauded each tableaux of triple-stacked performers. But it quickly became apparent that this was more than a series of circus tricks and that Lifschitz and the team had taken seriously Gluck’s original intent to subserviate vocal, visual and balletic display to the underlying dramatic purpose.
In that regard, the projection of the sung text as part of Boris Bagattini’s digital projection added to the integration. Rather than being relegated to a surtitle screen above the stage, from which audience members steal furtive distracting glances, the text became part of the narrative and design.
Yet, the work would be poorly served if the timeless appeal of Gluck’s restrained melodiousness were underdone. In Orpheus’s uniquely structured aria Chiamo il mio ben, staged against inventively choreographed activity from Circa, Dumeaux conveyed the bipolar expressive intent with a mix of strongly shaped melodic arches in the verses, and emotion-laden colour for the recitatives.
For Che Farò senza Euridice, dancers and chorus left while Dumeaux held the stage with simple phrases and finely burnished tone. Soprano Sandy Leung courageously stepped in at late notice to sing the roles of both Eurydice and Amore, inhabiting the parts with quietly mellifluous musicality and a sound of textured colour.
The Opera Australia Chorus began the work with strongly balanced solemnity, contributing fiery energy to the Dance of the Furies and a glowing apotheosis. Playing what I took to be the original 1762 version, rather than the later French edition with its popular flute solo in Dance of the Blessed Spirits, the Australian Opera Orchestra created cleanly textured support.
Conductor Dane Lam’s tempi emphasised pert liveliness without dwelling on moments of shadowy reflection. This compact, energetic production will bring delight and astonishment and, one hopes, new devotees to a classic work.
MUSIC
ANOUSHKA SHANKAR
Concert Hall, January 12
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★½
Anoushka Shankar’s music is as mellifluous and luxuriant as her name. She’d barely played two notes when I fell under her spell once more. As with her late father, Ravi, her virtuosity on the sitar goes far beyond mere dexterity.
The sound she makes is like the glint of sunlight on water made aural, and she shapes notes so they seem to be made of consonants and vowels as well as pitches; so the instrument speaks to you in quite specific ways of love, sadness, yearning and hope.
Anoushka Shankar’s performance was captivating from the first couple of notes.Credit: Jacquie Manning
Over her career she’s slipped between purist Hindustani classical music, more pop-oriented projects and hybrids of varying success. Her latest quintet represents a new pinnacle: a little orchestra ranging so freely that idiom becomes delightfully irrelevant, with Indian music, jazz and more atmospheric elements all in play, and the musicianship of a staggeringly high calibre.
Rather than having the conventional North Indian Hindustani tradition’s tabla player, she has a percussionist from the South Indian Carnatic tradition, Pirashanna Thevarajah, playing mridangam (doubled-headed hand-drum), kanjira (small frame-drum of the tambourine family) and morsing (jaw-harp), and he’s joined by Arun Ghosh (clarinet), Tom Farmer (double bass) and Sarathy Korwar (drum-kit).
The thrillingly energised Secret Heart was one of several compositions to feature the striking combined sound of the ringing sitar and woody clarinet. In Her Name seemed to boast two sitars and two mridangams, such was the avalanche of sonic information flowing from them, and on Daydreaming Shankar was at her most lyrical, the sitar sighing and crying against the rhythm section. A highlight was Ravi Shankar’s Fire Night, reimagined into a series of solos and dialogues of scorching intensity and expansive imagination, lit up by Korwar’s idiosyncratic drumming.
The sitar was very slightly too loud amid what was otherwise exceptional sound quality, and some tiny flaws in tricky rhythmic unisons perhaps reflected that the band has been apart for three months. But I hope Shankar keeps this project going: it may be what she’s been looking for all along.
Anoushka Shankar joins the Sydney Symphony Orchestra for Symphony Under The Stars, January 20, Parramatta
MUSICAL THEATRE
BIG NAME, NO BLANKETS
Roslyn Packer Theatre, January 11
Until January 14
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½
Forty years later it seems obvious an Aboriginal rock band would sing in a language other than English. Back then it was revolutionary. It stopped you dead with your beer midway to your mouth. Anyone who saw Warumpi Band live will remember the impact of their raw musical energy combined with George Rrurrambu’s singing in Luritja.
Then there were the songs, and that’s what this show, a musical tracing the band’s history, reminds you of more than anything: the sheer power of the likes of Blackfella/Whitefella and My Island Home.
Hailing from Papunya in the Northern Territory, the band was formed by guitarist Sammy Butcher, his brothers and Victorian guitarist Neil Murray. But as Sammy (Baykali Ganambarr) says, it was when they were joined by George (from Elcho Island) that “we had our band”. In Googoorewon Knox the show has a performer capable of catching George’s excitement.
Big Name, No Blankets reminds us of the sheer power of the likes of Blackfella/Whitefella and My Island Home.Credit: Brett Boardman
Big Name, No Blankets (also the title of the first Warumpi album) was written by Andrea James and directed by Rachael Maza and Anyupa Butcher, with Sammy Butcher a consultant throughout the show’s development. His involvement lends veracity, but this has come at the expense of creating a work of drama. Often it feels more like the theatre equivalent of a dramatised documentary (studded with songs), rather than a musical or play with a compelling narrative arc.
It has moments of undeniable charm, as when the Butcher boys first meet Murray (who has a guitar, an amp and a car), and it’s blessed with several spikes of humour, as when the band tours England for the first time, and Sammy says, “I can’t believe that tiny little country been bossing us around!”
Once we reach the point where the band is touring relentlessly, first one member and then another misses home and family, although these tensions are not made real to us as conflicts of consequence: there’s a brief argument, and then someone leaves.
Similarly, there’s a hint of friction between Murray (Jackson Peele) and drummer Gordon Butcher (Teangi Knox) about the latter’s playing, but this isn’t explained or expanded upon beyond a brief tiff. Even news of the death of the Butcher brothers’ mother is oddly unaffecting: another dot on a timeline, rather than an emotional king-hit.
It’s as though there’s been such – entirely understandable – reverence for Sammy Butcher that James has been unable to leave behind her concerns with authenticity, or with what Butcher would recognise, in the greater cause of creating a theatrical work.
This could have leaned on Warumpi Band’s history, but been prepared to diverge from it or focus on a narrower timeframe in the interests of simply telling a story.
Ganambarr plays Sammy with great dignity, and the character and script are at their best when he delivers the coda, which says, in part: “We weren’t looking for a hit. We just play music. Listen to the wind. Let the country talk to us. It wasn’t about the fame. It was about the responsibility to your people. Give the young ones something to look up to.”
The cast is completed by Aaron McGrath, Cassandra Williams and Tibian Wyles, and the convincing backing band, led by guitarist Gary Watling, includes two younger Butchers, Jason and Jeremiah.
The project, here having its world premiere, was assembled by Ilbijerri Theatre Company. Were they prepared to go back and interrogate their own work, thicken the characters and enrich the story, it would certainly deserve another life.
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