Sharon Millerchip’s remarkable performance will break your heart

THEATRE
Born on a Thursday
Old Fitz Theatre, November 30
Reviewed by CASSIE TONGUE
★★★★

You could just about sink into Soham Apte’s set and slip back to 1998. The thoughtfully detailed, warmly-lit kitchen and dining room – with a kettle on the boil, working stove, and commemorative spoons hung on the fridge – is a lived-in study of suburban 90s Australiana. Floral patterned mugs sit on the drying rack next to a dying plant. The radio is tuned to carols on ABC Classic. You’ve almost certainly been in a home like this before.

In Born on a Thursday, a new play by Jack Kearney, this level of intimacy - created by an instant sense of home and familiarity - is essential to the story. This is a play about how one family lives, struggles, loves and keeps going, which means it’s a story about all of us. Understanding who they are from first glance helps us dive deeper faster.

The production belongs to Sharon Millerchip and her remarkably deep, beautifully lived-in performanceCredit: Phil Erbacher

April (Sofia Nolan) has been working as a dancer in Denmark, but she’s back in western Sydney just in time for Christmas. She’s greeted fondly by longtime neighbour Howard (James Lugton), who is basically family – and a little more frostily by her mother Ingrid (Sharon Millerchip), home late from a shift at the local RSL.

This little family world was thrown upside down about 18 months earlier when April’s brother Isaac (Owen Hasluck) suffered a traumatic brain injury on the football field, and we approach the changes through April’s eyes. She’s missed the immediate fallout because she was so far away – and because she’s been dealing with her own problems.

As the characters settle into new rhythms after Christmas and move through 1999 (with Ingrid’s friend Estelle, played by Deborah Galanos, often dropping in for a wine), we learn more about them – their losses, successes, failures, and miscommunications.

Ingrid wants Isaac’s football club to take accountability for their part in Isaac’s accident; Isaac is learning his new normal; April has secrets that are festering the longer they’re kept; Howard keeps a close and loving watch over them all – especially Ingrid. Over countless cups of tea, a little Cottee’s and Milo, they learn to let each other in.

Kearney has made a well-crafted play that Lucy Clements directs like a classic family epic. Together, they dig deep into character, tracing long lines of experience, trauma, loss and struggle to build detailed portraits that show the extraordinarily complex worlds inside seemingly ordinary people. While Kearney’s dialogue skews lightly towards telling rather than showing, there’s a lovely natural rhythm to the conversation and especially the light, tossed-off family arguments.

This production, however, belongs to Sharon Millerchip. She plays Ingrid – the powerhouse of the family – in a remarkably deep, beautifully lived-in performance; while this is a woman with her walls up, her care, her strength and her gritted-teeth determination is clear. Her vulnerable moments could break your heart; her slow softening could melt you too. Kearney’s play is engaging across the board, but here at the Old Fitz, it belongs firmly to Millerchip. What an achievement.

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MUSIC
Rare Sugar
Omega Ensemble
ACO on the Pier, November 29
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★

It was the great jazz clarinettist Benny Goodman who commissioned Bela Bartok to write what he then termed a duo for clarinet and violin with piano accompaniment, so Goodman could play it with Bartok’s long-time friend, violinist Joseph Szigeti (Bartok played the piano on the historic recording the two made).

Bartok eventually lighted on the name Contrasts, capturing a number of the work’s features: slow and fast dances in the outer movements, contrasting timbre between clarinet and violin and perhaps also the contrasting playing styles of jazz and classical musicians (some commentators hear tentative attempts at jazz in Contrasts but, if intended, they are well-hidden beneath Bartok’s distinct, folk-derived musical language).

There was contrast aplenty between clarinettist David Rowden’s nonchalant approach to the opening melody of the first movement, Verbunkos (Recruiting dance) and violinist Veronique Serret’s musically focused, strongly articulated rendition of it at the return.

Violinist Veronique serret. Credit: Georgia Griffiths

Part of the appeal of this performance, with Vatche Jambazian on the piano, was the way their differing musical personalities emerged. The second movement was an even plaint between the two before erupting in a flash of tremelos, while the third, in which each is required to switch to differently tuned or pitched instruments, ran with wild energy.

Through the Mist, a new work for string quintet and piano by Australian Ella Macens, provided complete contrast to the surrounding music on the program. It began with spare low sounds that gradually evolved to warm low-pitched harmonies enlivened occasionally with dreamy fluttering sounds.

The work sustained profound stillness for its 20-minute duration through subtle shifts between drifting textures and translucent clarity. After a brief cadenza-like moment on the violin, there is a shift of awareness like the movement of air on still nights where the listener suddenly becomes aware of quiet humming.

Slightly more animated music ensues, but still within a flowing meditative framework. Macens’ work will receive international exposure next year when SSO Artistic Director Simone Young conducts her piece, The Space Between the Stars with the San Francisco Symphony.

Although Nigel Westlake’s Rare Sugar (2007) inhabits a different musical universe from the other composers in this concert, programming it as the opposing bookend to the Bartok drew attention to some affinities.

Westlake has always managed an easy fusion of classical and vernacular musical sensibilities and his inventive exploitation of rhythmic irregularity for propulsive effect bears some comparison with Bartok. Written for solo clarinet with piano and string quintet, Rare Sugar is in the nature of a chamber concerto for clarinet and Rowden and the ensemble dispatched it with energised virtuosity and brilliant precision.

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MUSIC
Bernstein & Busoni
Endangered Productions
Eternity Playhouse, November 28
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★½
This double bill was an inspired pairing of two, imaginatively directed, energetically presented operatic rarities, Busoni’s sophisticated commedia dell’arte parody Arlecchino, and Bernstein’s melancholy fable of the cracks in the American Dream, Trouble in Tahiti.

The Bernstein work featured one of Australia’s great sopranos, Cheryl Barker and the equally accomplished Peter Coleman-Wright as the middle-class couple who have everything except each other.

Unfortunately, both works were marred musically by wholly unnecessary and poorly mixed amplification of voices and instruments so that very few of the sounds heard throughout the evening were beautiful or even pleasant.

Cheryl Barker and Peter Coleman-Wright play a couple who have everything but each other. Credit: Marion Wheeler

Arlecchino was written towards the end of World War I and its anarchic chaos and manic non-seriousness are in part a reaction to that catastrophe. In the non-singing role of Arlecchino, Andy Leonard was bold and cheeky, articulating an amoral philosophy of seduction (as in Don Giovanni, which is quoted).

Much of his dialogue is with the audience and he successfully recruited one audience member to a military unit (it would be wise to avoid the front row). However, his hectoring style was wearing, particularly when amplified, and the part could tolerate some moments of subtler nuance.

As counterpoint to his hyperactivity, Ed Suttle sang fretfully as the Dante-loving cuckold whose art worship achieves nothing. As Arlecchino’s betrayed wife Colombina, Brea Holland had strong acrobatic stage presence with promising voice if one was allowed to hear it.

Damien Hall sang the role of the strutting, electric-guitar playing knight who seduces Columbina, although any lyric qualities of his voice were obscured. Ziggy Harris as a drunken abbott sang with smooth well-arched lines and Matthew Avery’s voice as an incompetent doctor had an aptly abrasive edge.

Cheryl Barker: One of Australia’s great sopranos. Credit: Marion Wheeler

Tenielle Thompson (also non-singing) as the tailor’s seduced wife proves more useful in the duel than her seducer and Kerwin Baya survived wardrobe malfunction as a donkey (this character’s role is not explained, which is presumably the point in this Dada-esque narrative).

Bianca de Nicolo’s colourful costumes created burlesque outrageousness and Christine Logan’s production pursued slapstick without quite achieving riotousness. Peter Alexander conducted with tenacious clarity but here, and in the Bernstein opera, this clarity did not flow through to the unbalanced sound of the amplified small orchestra as it emerged through the speakers.

As a real-life couple Barker and Coleman-Wright must surely communicate better than the alienated middle-class pair they portrayed in Trouble in Tahiti or they could not have created such a compelling portrait of the domestic dysfunction of the 1950s “perfect marriage”.

Bernstein completed the work just after his own marriage and juxtaposes musical styles to bring out the tension between appearance and reality (it also highlights the conflicts Bernstein felt between his Broadway and classical careers).

Lesley Braithwaite, Hall and Suttle formed a soft-shoe shuffle trio who sang with supple rhythm and groove, and crooned about how wonderful things are while the couple bicker over toast. Later, the perfect pair meet embarrassedly in the city and sing a duet (more like simultaneous soliloquies) about why they lied to each other about having a lunch appointment.

Coleman-Wright’s misogynistic There’s a Law was articulated with chilling confidence and vocal strength. Barker’s psychiatrist couch scene, sung with pure vowel, refined control and true line, was the musical highlight and her later showstopper What a Terrible Movie would have capped it if some mouse had chewed the speaker cables, which would be the quickest way to salvage this ambitious show.

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