Anger, walkouts: This show was an identity politics dumpster fire

THEATRE

Truth to Power Café ★
Theatre Works, February 5-6

Longtime HIV+ activist and survivor Jeremy Goldstein had staged the performance event Truth to Power Café 60 times around the world. The show’s format invites local artists and community leaders to “speak truth to power”, but the 61st event – programmed at Melbourne’s LGBTQIA+ arts and culture festival, Midsumma – turned into an identity politics dumpster fire, and what should have been an empowering experience spiralled helplessly into a miserable and traumatic one for participants and spectators alike.

In his work Truth to Power Cafe, Jeremy Goldstein stands in front of an image of Ebensee, a sub-camp of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

What went wrong? Well, Goldstein is the son of Mick Goldstein – one of the Hackney Gang, a group of six childhood friends, including Harold Pinter, who grew up in 1950s London. In his introduction, Goldstein interrogated his relationship with his late father and referred several times to Pinter’s only novel, The Dwarfs, which drew upon the gang’s experiences.

As it happens, four of the six young men were Jewish; the group was often set upon by Hackney fascists recently released from jail. A recorded interview with another of Pinter’s lifelong friends, Henry Woolf, contextualised Goldstein’s reference. A video montage incorporating an image of Holocaust survivors was shown. Clearly, Pinter did not call his unpublished novel The Dwarfs to offend anyone: it was because he and his working-class Jewish mates felt small and powerless in the wake of horrifying world events.

Unfortunately, using the word “dwarfs” so many times made other participants feel powerless. Disability and LGBTQIA+ rights activist Jax Brown called out the intro as “ableist”, later pre-empting criticism by saying it wasn’t “lateral aggression”. Jazz singer Mama Alto could barely contain her outrage, taking the stage and speaking her truth to Goldstein’s power, saying among other things that “dwarf” is an “outdated and offensive” term.

Proceedings were salvaged for a time by the person who had most cause to feel disempowered by Goldstein’s perceived insensitivity – dancer and performance artist Leisa Prowd, who lives with achondroplasia.

In a monologue drawn from life, Prowd’s anger at systemic disadvantage and ableist culture was hers to command. Was she fragile like dynamite, as she described herself? Yes, but in performance she wielded her humanity and dignity with eloquence, humour, intelligence and perspicacity. A precision weapon that zeroed in on injustice, without causing collateral damage. It was superb political theatre, fiery, moving and critically engaged.

It also required a considered acknowledgement and response from Goldstein, who cleaved to his (contextually tone-deaf) script in the finale, and failed to read the room so badly there were walkouts.

Now, I do not think anyone intended harm here. Goldstein didn’t mean to insult or trigger or dehumanise people with disability, Brown wasn’t being consciously antisemitic by failing to appreciate the context of Goldstein’s remarks, and doubtless Mama Alto had only the best intentions in expressing anger on behalf of those who might have been offended.

Good intentions are not enough, though, are they? Critical thinking, emotional intelligence and emotional control, a desire for understanding, compassion for the mistakes we are all going to make by virtue of being fallible creatures: these should be our guides.

Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSICAL THEATRE
Follies ★★★★
Victorian Opera, Palais Theatre, until Febrary 6

For Stephen Sondheim fans, this production of Follies will be a tremendously exciting prospect. It’s the rarest of opportunities to see the show, and Victorian Opera can rightly claim it as Melbourne’s first full staging of the musical at a commercial venue – although Boomers might have seen it performed at the Camberwell Civic Centre in 1979, or at the 2016 staged concert in the Melbourne Recital Centre with Lisa McCune and Philip Quast.

Taao Buchanan, Jack Van Staveren, Mia Simonette and Jacob Steen in Follies performed by Victorian Opera.Credit: Jeff Busby

Follies is the last of Sondheim’s major works to be ticked off my bucket list, and I’m glad to see it in middle age. Its spiky, unsparing take on disillusionment and the dangers and derangements of nostalgia is probably wasted on the young.

The curtain rises on a curtain about to fall. Former stars of the Weissman Follies – based on the interwar Ziegfeld Follies – gather to reminisce at their old New York theatre, soon to be demolished to make way for a car park.

As William Faulkner reminded us: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And the fancy canapes and awkward pleasantries of the showbiz party yield to a more troubling interior, a backstage of the mind. The musical’s characters are crawling with ghosts and memories and illusions.

For married couples Sally (Antoinette Halloran) and Buddy (Alexander Lewis), and Phyllis (Marina Prior) and Ben (Adam Murphy), the reunion provokes an encounter with what they recall of their youthful selves – played by Mia Simonette, Jacob Steen, Taao Buchanan, and Jack Van Staveren – and a reckoning with the lives they’ve lived since.

It’s much more volatile and cynical psychological terrain than the black comedy of Sondheim’s Company, and you can’t help feeling the maestro of American musical theatre was preparing to expiate a midlife crisis of his own when he wrote it.

This full-dress production gives much that a concert or a soundtrack can’t, including a close encounter with our own theatre’s grand dames – Anne Wood, Rhonda Burchmore, Colette Mann, Evelyn Krape, Meryln Quaife, Geraldene Morrow – all legends of the stage whose stars scintillate with enough comic talent to leaven the torment and self-loathing of the leads.

The dance between youth and age is evocatively rendered throughout. Age wins a pyrrhic victory: Prior embodying the fury and bitterness of the marital discord in Could I Leave You is a sight to behold.

A concert simply cannot capture the brilliance of Sondheim’s music drama folding in on itself in climactic “Follies” based on musical styles of yore, either. Director Stuart Maunder and the design team pull out all the stops for that showstopping conceit. It’s mesmerising to watch Halloran seduce us into her shrinking spotlight in Gershwin-like torch song Losing My Mind, or Lewis’ desperate vaudeville in The God-Why-Don’t-You-Love-Me Blues.

Musical theatre lovers should seize the opportunity to see Follies performed as intended. You may not get another chance, and the star-studded cast and live orchestra give this musical drama all the glamour and turbulence it needs to cast its haunting spell.

Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE
Shirley Valentine ★★★
Athenaeum Theatre, until February 16

If Sondheim’s Follies can leave a bitter taste in the mouths of the middle-aged, this upbeat touring production of Shirley Valentine is the perfect tonic. Audiences will likely know the one-woman play best from the 1989 film adaptation starring Pauline Collins, and it is just as charming with Natalie Bassingthwaighte in the title role.

Natalie Bassingthwaighte stars as Shirley Valentine at the Athenaeum.Credit: Brett Boardman

A middle-aged housewife from Liverpool, Shirley Valentine has lost herself. Her childhood dreams and youthful rebellion were abandoned when she fell in love and did what was expected of her – motherhood and marriage. Now her kids have grown up, Shirley has become desperately lonely, talking to the wall as she cleaves to her dreary domestic routine.

While cooking for a distant and psychologically abusive husband, Shirley breaks open a bottle of wine and gossips endlessly and good-naturedly about everything. Her kids, her own childhood, her marriage and how her life has descended into loneliness … and her feminist friend, Jane, who has bought her a ticket for a girls’ trip to Greece which might offer a reprieve from the misery and sense of loss she feels – if her husband lets her go, that is.

When he takes out his rage at his own miserable life on her one too many times, Shirley ups and leaves for Greece on the sly. It becomes a journey of self-discovery and transformation.

Shirley retains her cute quirks – she still talks to inanimate objects and probably always will – but reclaims her self-confidence and reimagines her own destiny, determined to live for herself, unencumbered by regret.

Natalie Bassingthwaighte has the charisma and acting chops and comic charm to keep audiences beguiled and moved and amused.Credit: Brett Boardman

A full-length, one-woman play is a serious challenge, and Bassingthwaighte has the charisma and acting chops and comic charm to keep audiences beguiled and moved and amused.

The first half is stronger: Bassingthwaighte steers the offbeat observational humour around poignant glimpses of what the character has lost. Director Lee Lewis helps to achieve a strong sense of domestic menace through design and interpretation, alive to the fact that while Shirley doesn’t think of herself as a feminist, she becomes one through action.

The odd spell-breaker creeps in after interval. Bassingthwaighte’s Scouser accent doesn’t slip exactly, but the effort shows. There’s a muffed line here and there, and the characterisation leans harder on a narrow range of affectations. These flaws will vanish as the season progresses, I think, and they’re easy to overlook in an otherwise impressive and endearing performance that had the audience on its feet.

Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
The Cage Project ★★★★★
The Recital Centre, February 4

The Cage Project is a sophisticated, multisensory experience combining a performance of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes with a large installation designed by Matthias Schack-Arnott in an utterly mesmerising spectacle of lights, shadows and otherworldly music.

Completed in 1948, this is the most enduring example of Cage’s work for prepared piano, where everyday objects like screws and bolts are wedged among the strings and hammers, creating a plethora of sounds that jangle or plink or thud.

Pianist Cedric Tiberghien gives an immaculately nuanced performance of Sonatas and Interludes.

And like so many of his works, it lends itself to elaborate multimedia collaborations. With its patterned simplicity and spaciousness, it already gestures towards a more expansive live presentation, with possibilities not only for interpretation but elaboration.

In this one-off Melbourne performance, celebrated French pianist Cédric Tiberghien proves attentive to the subtler delicacies of the score, dexterously tracing the fractures and voids, the muted suggestions of thrumming engines and fragments of more exotic melody.

And all the while, the vast black machine looms over him, suspended from the high ceiling like one of Alexander Calder’s hanging mobiles.

During the early sonatas, so angular and cold, the stage remains dark except for a single soft spotlight on Tiberghien. The broken, stony sounds are strung out, spaced well apart like the as-yet-unmoving beams of the installation.

As the snakier, more rhythmic material emerges, beginning with the first interlude, the lights – designed by Keith Tucker – gradually brighten and the arms of the installation, each with a series of robotic instruments fixed along its length, slowly begin to rotate.

The instruments can be seen winking and twitching as they move through the lights. Little hammers, each one programmed to respond to a different prepared note of the piano, tap away at bits of wood and metal, creating new sonic textures.

Many images are suggested as the arms move through various sonic and spatial arrangements and long shadows reach across the walls of the hall. It might be an apparatus of surveillance or a great black bird, the insides of a clock or a gloomy music box.

There is also much in this performance that suggests orbits, revolutions and cosmic phases, and in the end, of course, we are returned to darkness. The lights go down, with one spotlight again lingering on the face of Tiberghien.

It’s an unforgettable conclusion to a performance – so solemn and contemplative, with its quiet largeness – that inspires such haunting visions.

Andrew Fuhrmann

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers by Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.