This play about Julia Gillard will hold your attention, regardless of your politics

THEATRE
Julia ★★★
By Joanna Murray-Smith, Melbourne Theatre Company, until July 13

It’s good to see Joanna Murray-Smith – a playwright whose feminism has always gone hand in hand with unsparing wit – tackling the life and legacy of Julia Gillard, our first female prime minister.

It’s worth seeing this show just to watch Justine Clarke transform into Julia Gillard.Credit: Prudence Upton

To say there’s a whiff of hagiography about this show is to admit what may be inevitable when you make theatre about someone who’s still alive.

And yet Murray-Smith’s irreverent humour gently clips the wings of fulsome praise, grounding her play in the conflict between idealism and pragmatism, the grim compromises involved in winning, keeping and exercising power, and, yes, the impact of gender on the way Gillard’s political life was read and reported.

How gender influenced Gillard’s prime ministership was provisionally answered in the PM’s own resignation speech. “It doesn’t explain everything,” she said. “It doesn’t explain nothing; it explains some things, and it is for the nation to think in a sophisticated way about those shades of grey.”

“Sophisticated” isn’t the word for the merry-go-round of male prime ministers we’ve had since Gillard – none of whom came close to matching the scale of her legislative achievement – despite her “misogyny speech” echoing around the world.

This production of Julia has a strength for every weakness.Credit: Prudence Upton

And it continues to reverberate. You can draw a line from Gillard’s feminist cri de coeur to the #MeToo movement, say, or the rise of teal independents. It also makes for stirring verbatim theatre. Indeed, it’s worth seeing this show just to watch Justine Clarke transform into Gillard and deliver the speech – a thrilling display of inspired rhetoric and controlled rage – in full.

Impersonation, however, is only used for emphasis or direct quotation – but at the expense of a commanding tour de force, an acting achievement on par, say, with Heather Mitchell’s recent turn as Ruth Bader Ginsberg.

What it does have is a winning feminist playfulness. Clarke leaps into a parodic incarnation of Gillard coming to power, morphing into Lady Macbeth and a psycho-killer, before quipping that Kevin Rudd’s demise wasn’t a political assassination, but “suicide by ego”.

Another sequence features Gillard furiously ribbon-dancing as the new PM – an absurd spectacle that portrays the groundswell of genuine goodwill Gillard enjoyed, especially from women, during her honeymoon period, while taking a sarcastic swipe at the idea that having a woman at the top will solve all gendered oppression.

Other aspects of the play can be glib, and one device feels tokenistic. The use of a nearly mute second performer, Jessica Bentley, is a sop to Cerberus, a mere gesture to marginalised women failed by liberal feminism.

The play also evades finer questions about how sexism, and male-dominated environments, might’ve changed Gillard’s character and behaviour for the worse. Nostalgia for Welsh mining disasters gets Julia’s strong sense of social justice across, for instance, but her rise through the ranks of the ALP is barely telegraphed and doesn’t get as much stage time as a teenage Gillard bopping along to ’80s anthems as if she were on MTV.

But this production has a strength for every weakness. Renee Mulder’s elegant, hi-tech set reduplicates the stage action using live projections – a seductive digital mirage which, at its best, augments drama by juxtaposing public image and private life. And director Sarah Goodes marshals all elements of theatrical craft into a rousing biographical drama that should hold your attention, regardless of your politics.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE
Counting and Cracking ★★★★★
Rising Festival, Union Theatre, until June 23

When Counting and Cracking opens, it is 2004 and Siddhartha (Shiv Palekar) is reluctantly taking part in a Sri Lankan funeral ritual in western Sydney. The 21-year-old would rather be hanging out with his friends, who call him Sid, or listening to the music signalled by the indie band T-shirts he dons – but his mother, Radha (Nadie Kammallaweera), insists.

Shiv Palekar as Siddhartha in the opening scene of Counting and Cracking.Credit: Pia Johnson

A phone call from Colombo informs the mother and son of shocking family news, and is the point from which this story departs, blooming across decades and borders.

Finally showing in Melbourne after debuting in 2019 – and heading, next, to New York – S. Shakthidharan’s award-winning play is an impressive feat of theatre. It features 19 performers from six countries speaking five languages, and charts the impacts of the Sri Lankan civil war on one family across generations.

Three musicians sit in the corner of the stage, with their live Carnatic soundtrack adding atmosphere, depth and sometimes even humour. The heady smell of incense wafts around the room. Water from a slip’n’slide splashes towards a laughing audience.

There are moments of joy, exuberance and humour alongside grief, anger and hurt in this profoundly human story.Credit: Pia Johnson

Actors are dotted around the theatre’s wings, spotlighted as they speak or translate; Dale Ferguson’s cavernous set captures the enormity and scope of the story, colourful and vibrant at one moment, desolate at the next. Outside the theatre between acts, Sri Lankan food is served. This is a play for all the senses.

There are moments of joy, exuberance and humour alongside grief, anger and hurt in this profoundly human story, and Shakthidharan’s dextrous writing brings it all to the fore.

Kammallaweera is excellent as the older Radha, commanding the stage with her ferocious presence and tightly controlled emotions; in scenes from 1977, we see the headstrong young woman as she becomes herself, defying her parents and carving her own path. As she says, “life must hijack politics.”

Despite its 3½-hour, three-act runtime, Counting and Cracking rarely lags – its second act is the most dense in terms of historical information, but it always feels accessible.

That old adage – the personal is political – rings true in Shakthidharan’s telling of this family’s story, based on his own family’s story.

It is as much about Sid’s personal journey towards embracing his culture and family as it is about the history of Sri Lanka and the experience of multigenerational diaspora in Australia.

Deeply felt and searingly intelligent, Counting and Cracking has all the makings of a modern Australian classic.
Reviewed by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

DANCE
You, Beauty ★★★
Rising Festival, Immigration Museum, until June 16

Despite the title, there’s little in this performance installation created by Chunky Move artistic director Antony Hamilton that you could call beautiful – at least, not in any conventional sense.

You, Beauty contains plenty that’s strange and memorable.

There is, however, plenty that’s strange and memorable. Staged in the vast Long Room of the Immigration Museum, it features a giant inflatable bag that becomes the chamber for an intimate performance by dancers Samakshi Sidhu and Enzo Nazario.

The show begins, rather weakly, with a duet in front of the slowly inflating balloon. It’s feeble stuff, made up of tiny little bits of dance grafted together with a lot of silly byplays: lingering glances and beatific smiles.

Eventually, the large bag, manipulated from inside and outside, takes centre stage. It’s a compelling visual experience, with huge contortions pressing against the high ceiling and distant walls.

Despite the title, there’s little in this performance installation that you could call beautiful.

With the strobing lights and the enormity of the space, it’s an almost apocalyptic vision. I could imagine a kind of cosmic worm, writhing across aeons but seen in a few sublime minutes: not exactly beautiful, but impressive.

The world inside the inflatable, on the other hand, is cold and inorganic. Sitting on the floor, we feel the hard stone of the hall. The material is synthetic and slippery and a breeze circulates constantly. The lighting is also cool, with garish, contrasting colours, while the sound design is fragmentary and often dissonant.

At the centre of this plastic egg, Sidhu projects a kind of lonely sovereignty. A slow solo culminates in the striking image of Sidhu enthroned, head thrown back, ululating, as Nazario pushes in from outside.

A second duet follows, which is almost as insipid as the first, albeit less precious. (Nazario dances while picking out tunes on a small keyboard.) The finale, however, is undeniably uplifting: figuratively and literally.

The audience is released from the balloon in dramatic fashion and sent reeling into the afternoon feeling lighter and brighter.

Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

THEATRE
Ghosts ★★
Adapted from Ibsen by Jodi Gallagher, Theatre Works, until June 15

Transposed to a homestead in the 19th century Victorian bush, rather than a coastal Norwegian orphanage, this adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts is otherwise creatively unadventurous. Nor does it sport performances that can quite wrest the drama’s vortex of repression and anguish into inexorable and appalling social tragedy – Ghosts is arguably Ibsen’s bleakest play, in a competitive field.

Kira May Samu in a scene from Ghosts at Theatre Works.Credit: Daniel Rabin

That’s hardly a crime. Gale Edwards’ production for the MTC in 2014 didn’t manage it either and, although in that version I had cause to lament the broad Australian accents, specifically adapting the play to colonial Australia is a different kettle of fish.

Look, it’s probably a terrible idea to go the whole hog and rescore Ibsen in Banjo-like bush verse, but Jodi Gallagher’s adaptation does need a freer hand and more Australian vernacular to work.

A few references to the heat, turning homeless mariners into miners, and building a homestead onstage just don’t cut it. The world-building is too anemic, and the locale change feels almost purely decorative, without dramatic import.

What we do get (after the cast indulges in gothic skanking to industrial music, out of nowhere) is a fairly trad production in period costume.

It’s a reasonable intro for schoolkids who haven’t seen the play before, emphasising some thematic aspects – Ibsen’s scathing critique of marriage and religion are both engorged with hypocrisy and life-denying force – while glossing over some of the play’s nuance and irony.

Laura Iris Hill is a spectral Mrs Alving, creating an impressive façade of dignity and delivering with asperity the monologue revealing the true ghosts of the play – all those “dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs” that swim between the lines of newspapers.

It’s too ghostly a performance, largely because we get little sense of the weakness of the flesh. Philip Hayden’s Pastor Manders gives a shallow performance of sexual repression and it compromises what should be erotically-charged turmoil.

That isn’t true of the younger, inadvertently incestuous lovers – Mrs Alving’s son Oswald (Gabriel Cali), an artist dying of syphilis inherited from his father, and Regina (Kira May Samu), raised as a maid but in fact Oswald’s half-sister – although cuts make the tragic climax a very steep mountain to climb.

L-R: Kira May Samu, Philip Hayden, and Gabriel CaliCredit: Daniel Rabin

Ultimately, this production itself is ensnared by dead ideas, and creatively, it might be time to look forward rather than back.

The most vital Ibsen adaptations I’ve seen in the 21st century, after all, have reckoned with the modern world: Thomas Ostermeier from the Schaubühne in Berlin reimagining Hedda Gabler amid a milieu of drugged-up, nihilistic ’90s yuppies; or his An Enemy of the People, restaged as a town hall meeting; or, locally, Daniel Schlusser’s The Dollhouse from 2011, starring Nikki Shiels as Nora Helmer, which elegantly contemporised the action and juxtaposed both endings Ibsen wrote for the play.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
The Boite 45th Birthday Celebration Concert ★★★★
Collingwood Town Hall, June 1

In June 1979, multicultural organisation The Boite presented its very first concert, with artists representing music traditions from Greece, Chile, New Guinea and indigenous Australia.

South African quintet Makepisi radiated vitality through their syncopated vocal rhythms and exquisite harmonies.

The mission of the fledgling Melbourne-based organisation was the same then as it is today: to support culturally diverse artists and promote connection and understanding through live music.

Exactly 45 years after that first concert, The Boite celebrated its birthday on Saturday with a large-scale concert at the Collingwood Town Hall. Over three hours, more than 50 performers came together to illustrate the remarkable breadth, depth and enduring impact of The Boite’s cultural activities.

Kavisha Mazzella performed her first Melbourne gig at The Boite in the ’90s.

We heard from artists who have a decades-long association with The Boite – including singer/guitarist Kavisha Mazzella, who was invited by The Boite to give her first-ever gig in Melbourne in the early 1990s. Mazzella opened Saturday’s concert with a poignant Italian folk song, and also served as the evening’s convivial MC.

We heard from a young Colombian-born duo (Pal Mar), who took part in The Boite’s Portfolio program for emerging talent. Stella Savy and Deb Lowah Clark (both previous directors of The Boite’s massed-choir program for schools across Victoria) shared songs from the Torres Strait Islands, while community choir Sonidos del Alma offered folk songs from Latin America.

Several superb a cappella groups emphasised the power of the human voice to tap into centuries-old stories and traditions. South African quintet Makepisi radiated vitality through their syncopated vocal rhythms and exquisite harmonies, while Gorani and the Melbourne Georgian Choir faced off from opposite sides of the hall, their majestic voices projecting as if from distant mountain tops.

The Music Between united artists and instruments from Iran, Italy, India and Indonesia in a captivating set that reflected the desire of current Boite director Zulya Kamalova to foster new cross-cultural collaborations.

And the 12-piece Balkan brass band Opa Bato transformed the concert into a full-blown party. Their visceral, pulsating horns and frenetic odd-metered rhythms brought many in the audience to their feet, embodying the spirit of inclusion and engagement that lies at the heart of The Boite’s philosophy. Long may it flourish.
Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas

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