Story of a murderous brute draws a monumental performance

THEATRE
CORIOLANUS
The Neilson Nutshell, June 25
Until July 19
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★

The exercise of power is a grubby business. Favours are sought, envy is rife and rivalries brutal. Coriolanus wasn’t bred for politics. He was suckled at his vulpine mother’s breast for one purpose: war. He’s more than a match for any of Shakespeare’s great killing machines (Macbeth, Hotspur, Othello, etc), but his murderous success is his undoing. It makes him ripe for republican Rome’s powerful political position of consul, and to seal the deal, he must sway the mob via the tribunes, “the tongues of the common mouth”.

That Coriolanus is an outlier in Shakespeare’s canon – having an unsympathetic hero and no subplots, among other idiosyncrasies – accounts for its infrequent performance. Bell Shakespeare last presented it three decades ago, when Steven Berkoff’s production transfixed you to your chair. Now, it’s back, directed by Peter Evans, and starring Hazem Shammas as Coriolanus.

Hazem Shammas and Peter Carroll in Coriolanus.Credit: Brett Boardman

The production is defined by its invigorating freshness of approach. What is generally a distinctly mirthless play here enjoys several laughs that are neither forced nor imposed. Many come courtesy of Peter Carroll’s Menenius, the elder of Coriolanus’ patrician class, and a man constantly flabbergasted by the foolishness of those around him. Heightening Menenius’ sense of his own wisdom and elegance, Carroll mines a rich seam of humour throughout.

It’s also an austere work, with Coriolanus himself the brutalist image of austerity, wrapped in a cloak of pride. But Shammas introduces another layer: an extravagance of voice and flamboyance of gesture that ride on the lines without jarring. Even if Shakespeare made his hero hard to love, Shammas makes us intrigued by the man and the sharp relief into which his relationships are thrown.

He has only disdain for the plebeians who would feast their eyes upon his war-wounds before they’ll sanction his consulship. He has a hatred bordering on love for Aufidius (a too tame Anthony Taufa), who leads Rome’s enemies, the Volscians, and an oddly flimsy ardour for his wife Virgilia (Suzannah McDonald, Shammas’ real-life partner).

The strongest bond is with his mother, Volumnia (Brigid Zengeni). Having raised him to be a warrior, she’s derived vicarious ecstasy from his exploits – wallowing in tales of his spilt blood like a sow in gory mud. Zengeni has the haughtiness, triumphalism and intensity to have raised this monster. The play’s key scene, however, where (with Coriolanus having sided with the Volscians after being banished) she pleads with him to spare Rome, partially goes missing. Something about Evans’ staging and Zengeni’s performance falls short of the searing heat that alone should change Coriolanus’ mind.

The traverse staging creates a huge playing area between the banks of seats, along which the 10-strong cast roll a wheeled rostrum to define different scenes. Initially effective, this becomes fussy when moved too often, chewing up time in a three-hour show. But the production is coherent in its vision, and draws from Shammas a performance that rises to the monumental.

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Eternity in an Hour
Sydney Philharmonia Choirs
Opera House Concert Hall, June 28
Peter McCallum
★★★½

“Eternity in an hour” sounds like the ultimate capitulation to the Tiktok generation’s notoriously short attention span. It is also the fourth line from William Blake’s aphoristic poem, Auguries of Innocence, and the title of an eight-movement, 60-minute setting of those four lines by American composer Eric Whitacre.

Standing with focused concentration for the designated eternity, Sydney Philharmonia’s youth choir, Vox, along with digitally synthesised accompaniment, cellist Julian Smiles and pianist Tim Cunniffe, delivered a fresh, smooth and lucent performance of the piece under Whitacre’s direction, creating a meditative space that slowed the listeners’ expectations to its gently numbing repetitiveness.

Eric Whitacre conducting the world premiere of Eternity in an Hour at the BBC Proms 2024.Credit: Chris Christodoulo

The urge to create an experience of meditatively-based musical time is an old one, found in Renaissance polyphony and, in our own age, in works such as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung, Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach and Satyagraha and in the minimalist repetitive music of Steve Reich and Terry Riley.

When compared to these works, Whitacre’s music was less austere in avoiding change and several movements, notably the final one, evolved towards climactic peaks in a quasi-cinematic expression of emotion. The sound world had misty translucence, added digital resonance and wispy after-echoes, and the piano notes were given an electronic mistuned twang, like an exotic instrument.

As is fitting for eternity, Whitacre’s score is unrushed, its repetitions moved caressingly, like clouds. Whitacre signals the changes of movements by the elegant striking of crotales by one of the choir members, which reminded me of our family’s grandfather clock tolling the hours of sleepless nights. Whether eternity will furnish a similar convenience, only time will tell.

The first half began with Deborah Cheetham Fraillon and Matthew Doyle’s musical acknowledgement of country Tarimi Nulay – Long time living here followed by Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque, which Vox began with warm alto chords, immediately given iridescence by the sopranos. Sarah Hopkins’ Past Life Melodies began with a simple unison melody, repeated against held notes, then moved to a second melody evoking those of indigenous Australia.

In its third section, Vox achieved some magical harmonic singing in which high harmonics danced above the sung notes, though the section was disappointingly short. For Edwin London’s Bach (again) the choir sang Bach’s chorale Komm, susser Tod (in English) and then repeated this with hand gestures, each singer progressing at their own pace so that the chorale moved in mutating clusters.

Whitacre’s Cloudburst closed the first half, beginning with a simple major chord that rapidly fragmented into granulated dissonance. After spoken and sung solos, the choir, in a moment of evocative pictorialism, started to accompany its singing with finger-clicks and claps to create a showered cacophony that petered out to scattered drops, no sooner had it burst.

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MUSIC
Jimmy Barnes
State Theatre, June 27
Reviewed by MICHAEL RUFFLES
★★★★

The man, the myth, the seemingly indestructible rock god that is Jimmy Barnes has an enormous legend to live up to. Fortunately, he has a voice big enough to match.

He belted his way through a rollicking set that showcased his latest No.1 album, Defiant, bookended with enough classics from the dawn of Aussie rock to keep everyone satisfied.

And while I wouldn’t go as far as saying I like the new stuff better than the old stuff (surely a breach of some national security law), there is a lot to like in the fresh material.

For one thing, it suits his voice as it is today rather than, say, a man half his age. After bursting onto the stage with the cracking Flesh and Blood and uplifting I’d Die to Be With You Tonight, Barnes was a little on the hoarse side for Cold Chisel heartbreaker Choir Girl.

The new tracks make a virtue of his assets. Among the best are The Long Road, a country-tinged epic about hard living; the jaunty blues of Damned If I Do, Damned If I Don’t that if you squint your ears might fit on a Rolling Stones record; and That’s What You Do for Love (spelled “luuuuuurve”), which has all the ingredients of a mid-’90s chart-topping rock banger.

There was enough variety too, as the soulful Sea of Love veered towards Motown without jumping the shark, and the love letter to wife Jane, Beyond the River Bend, who was brought down stage from backing vocals to play the bagpipes. The title track was the most straightforward rocker, and the most powerful for it.

Then came the classics. Granddaughter Ruby Rogers led proceedings for Flame Trees, and Barnes soaked in the moment as the crowd took over towards the end. Lay Down Your Guns has lost little of its punch over the years, while No Second Prize is rousing as ever.

Good as the new songs are, let’s be honest, hearing Barnes deliver the career-defining Working Class Man and Khe Sanh is almost worth the price of admission alone.

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THEATRE
Primary Trust
The Ensemble Theatre
June 24, until July 12
Reviewed by JOYCE MORGAN
★★★★

He’s the nervy guy sitting in the corner of the Hawaiian-themed bar quietly downing mai tais.

Kenneth has done this nightly for nearly 20 years, never engaging with anyone else in the bar. That is, apart from his loyal friend, Bert, his constant companion.

But Bert is invisible. That’s not a spoiler. We learn almost at the outset that Bert is an imaginary friend.

Charles Allen and Albert Mwangi in Primary Trust.Credit: Prudence Upton

Eboni Booth’s 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winning play is about loneliness, trauma and a man on the sidelines of life. If that sounds glum, it’s far from it. This is a gentle chamber piece that celebrates how the simplest acts of kindness and compassion can help transform a troubled soul.

Set in a fictional small town in upstate New York, it’s home to few non-whites. Kenneth doesn’t know why his long-dead single mother moved there years ago, he says as he addresses the audience directly.

Race is not an overt theme in the play, but we understand that his life is harder as a man of colour.

Kenneth is about to lose the bookshop job he’s held for almost two decades. The cantankerous owner is about to retire. And it’s throwing Kenneth into a tailspin.

He is helped along the way by a series of compassionate figures. There’s the waitress, Corrina, who tells him about a job in the local bank, and the bank manager who hires him because Kenneth reminds him of his brain-damaged brother.

It’s under the bank manager’s blustery benevolence that Kenneth discovers he has a talent for his job. But it’s not all plain sailing.

Darren Yap has directed with imagination and clarity this superbly acted piece. Headed by Albert Mwangi as Kenneth, he creates a rounded figure of the socially awkward, damaged man whose rising anxiety is expressed bodily, as he repeatedly pats his thighs and grips his clothes.

Mwangi has us truly rooting for his oversharing Kenneth who unpacks his story without a scrap of sentimentality.

Charles Allen as Bert is an ideal foil. He’s a reliable figure who knows how to allay Kenneth’s distress, offering a warm supporting hand on his back – he really does have his friend’s back – or calmly helping Kenneth back from the brink through counting down from 10.

Angela Mahlatjie is delightful. She plays a parade of drinks waitresses, creating vivid comic cameo characters with little more than “welcome to Wally’s” to work with. As Corrina, she is the first to offer Kenneth genuine friendship.

Peter Kowitz is memorable as Kenneth’s two employers: the decrepit bookshop owner and the bank manager with a heart of gold.

The sound design (Max Lambert and Roger Lock) helps reveal Kenneth’s deteriorating mental state. What begins as the brief sound of a short-circuited fuse accompanied by flickering lights (lighting designer Verity Hampson) reaches a crescendo as Kenneth reaches breaking point.

This is a production stronger than the play itself. With incisive performances, it’s a pacy, warm-hearted show about life on the margins.

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THEATRE
The Play That Goes Wrong
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
June 24
Reviewed by CASSIE TONGUE
★★★½

It started in a 60-seat theatre above a London pub, and then took over the world. The Play That Goes Wrong – a farce about an amateur theatre troupe attempting to stage an Agatha Christie-esque murder mystery – is that rare thing in contemporary theatre: a raging commercial smash.

This family-friendly show has been running in the West End for more than a decade and in Spain for almost as long, sparked a plethora of British “Goes Wrong” TV series and specials, and has played all over the world. It’s now back in Australia, wreaking havoc at the Sydney Opera House, after a buzzy 2017 debut.

The Play That Goes Wrong veers wildly off script.Credit: Hagen Hopkins

The show is fast-paced, silly, and engineered to wring every laugh it can out of its material: as the company tries to perform their serious murder mystery, they’re contending with mislaid props, actors who don’t know their lines (or can’t pronounce them) and technicians too busy scrolling to land the right music cue. There are pratfalls, missed cues, and a set that’s threatening to come down around the cast at any moment. Who did the murders? We find out eventually, but that’s not the point: the point is the carefully scripted chaos.

Originally directed by Mark Bell, overseen here by associate director Anna Marshall, and with a cast (which includes Aunty Donna’s Joe Kosky) who have settled into their roles during this Australia/New Zealand tour, it’s a polished piece that encourages scenery-chewing.

There’s so much to laugh at that it’ll catch even the sourest audience member at least once, but you’ll get the most out of it if you like your mayhem surface level and easily digestible. There’s not much pathos behind all the comedy, meaning that existential human bent of the greatest farces is nowhere to be found. Instead, this is pure escapist comedy: a series of gags, mostly physical, designed to delight.

The cleverest jokes are those feats of engineering, mechanics and rigging when the set itself “goes wrong”; there’s a collapsing set piece that adds the frisson of danger that propels farces to another level. The worst were dated in 2017 and feel ancient now, where the two women onstage are reduced to stereotypes of hysteria and jealous competition, and a moment a potential kiss between two men in the middle of a casting mishap is played for panic. Designed to add to the growing hysteria of a falling-apart production, these elements drag down the mood, more noise than joke.

Am I guilty of overthinking a simple-pleasure comedy? Probably. And I don’t want to discount the power this show could have to give kids (recommended for those aged eight and up) their chance to be bitten by the theatre bug, or to give audiences of any age a chance to blow off steam in an increasingly dark world by just having a reason to laugh.

That’s probably the best lens through which to view this play: it’s a daffy, low-stakes outing that just wants you to cackle – or at least crack a smile – and get those feel-good endorphins flowing.

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