Take a bow: This five-star play is a colossal achievement
By Peter McCallum, James Jennings, Chantal Nguyen and Harriet Cunningham
The Inheritance
Reginald Theatre, Seymour Centre
November 10
Until November 30
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★★★★
What do we inherit from past generations? Wealth? Wisdom? And what happens when there is no past generation to inform the next? The Inheritance by American playwright Matthew Lopez draws inspiration from the work of twentieth-century novelist E. M. Forster, in particular his novel Howards End, published in 1910.
Forster’s tangled narrative of British society in the early 20th-century becomes a road map of sorts for Lopez’s play, which charts two generations of New York’s gay community, through the early AIDS crisis of the 1980s to the crisis of democracy in which we find ourselves now.
The Inheritance has a large ensemble cast.Credit: Phil Erbacher
Toby is a writer and Eric is a social activist. They live in Eric’s late aunt’s rent-controlled apartment in a grand edifice overlooking Central Park. Eric throws parties for their large circle of friends. Adam, a young gay man, walks into one of these parties, unannounced and uninvited, to return a bag Toby has mistakenly left behind in a bookshop. His chance arrival throws Toby’s life into a slow-growing snowball of chaos.
Meanwhile, Eric befriends Walter, an older gay man and his upstairs neighbour, whose partner Henry, a property developer, travels for work for months on end, leaving Walter alone. Their friendship becomes the antithesis to Toby’s chaos, a still centre in a whirling world. Six hours later, we have been to Berlin and Fire Island, via ecstasy and despair, arriving at a fragile peace.
The Inheritance is unashamedly intellectual and mischievously self-reflexive: it’s a play about a play about a playwright, after all. There are literary jokes to be enjoyed, and brief moments of heavy-handed exposition to be endured. Lopez uses a huge range of theatrical devices: at times he writes for a tightly-knit Greek chorus; at others, an extended soliloquy accompanied by a rough ballet of coupling couples.
We step out of intense Socratic dialogue and hallucinatory ensemble set pieces into the mind of the writer and his trans-historical companion, E M Forster. But, despite the playwright’s greedy demands of his cast, crew and audience, The Inheritance unravels with a compelling eloquence.
No small part of this is due to the commitment and facility of the large ensemble cast and small creative team. Shane Anthony choreographs the epic tale with dexterity and vision, creating intimate spaces and grand set pieces with an unwavering coherence.
Kate Beere’s elegant, minimal set, crucially supported by Alex Berlage’s lighting, leaves most of the setting to the imagination. The exception to this is a reveal at the end of the first part, which arrives like Cinderella’s fairy godmother, with a redeeming flash of beauty.
And then there are the performances. As Eric, Teale Howie is a glowing foil to the frantic blaze of Ryan Panizza’s Toby Darling. Tom Rodgers is overwhelming in the dual roles of Adam and Leo, covering an almost unfathomable range of experiences without missing a beat. Vanessa Downing arrives late in the piece, an intricately involved outsider bearing witness to a generational tragedy.
Simon Burke plays the roles of Walter and E. M. Forster with a delicacy and emotional intelligence that is deeply moving. As for John Adam’s portrayal of the easy-to-hate Henry Wilcox, it walks a febrile tightrope between assured competence and self-loathing.
The Inheritance is a colossal achievement. Ambitious and transformative, flawed at times, and excruciatingly relevant to this moment, it asks much of its performers and its audience but gives so much in return that you come away feeling like you have been handed something infinitely precious.
Simone Young conducts Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Opera House Concert Hall, November 9.
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½
Two markedly different performances of Mozart’s Symphony No 41 in C major, K. 551, the Jupiter, have graced Sydney’s concert platforms within the past fortnight: Simone Young’s spacious reading with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in this concert and Paul Dyer’s bristling approach on period instruments with the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra earlier in the month.
Where Dyer’s opening was spiky and arresting, Young’s was majestic and commanding (the latter accords more closely with Mozart’s notation). She allowed players the space to shape ideas with natural musicianship and refinement and let the ends of phrases ring, resonate or taper questioningly depending on the moment.
At the start, Mozart sets up a dialogue between grandeur and grace, the former using full orchestra with trumpets and drums, the latter drawing out more delicate colours from strings and, later, wind. Young eschewed urgency and impetuosity to allow these to unfold with natural logic towards Arcadian equilibrium. In the slow movement, Young and the SSO carefully balanced muted strings and wind, allowing the delicate hues of the second theme to blend with subtle intimacy.
The Menuetto found a natural gait in which the phrases naturally fell into long paragraphs. They played the great finale, where intricate contrapuntal detail creates exalted moments of sublime elegance, with exhilarating momentum (though omitting the repeat of the second section). It was a performance in the European tradition, bringing to mind the memorable Jupiter from Herbert Blomstedt and the Leipzig Gerwandhaus Orchestra in this hall, 21 years ago.
In the first half, comprising earlier 18th-century music by J.S. and C.P.E Bach, Young sat at the harpsichord, allowing concertmaster Andrew Haveron to lead, and trusting the close listening of a smaller group of instrumentalists to ensure cohesive musical continuity. In J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, the 10 string players tossed phrases to one another with playful deftness.
Bach wrote just two chords in place of a slow movement, which prompted here an improvised interlude led off by Young, taken up by viola and completed by Haveron. In contrast to the mellifluous flow of his father’s music, C.P.E Bach’s Flute Concert in G major, begins with a theme of angular contours.
Flautist Joshua Batty played the first movement with freedom, agility and brilliance, as though of crossing an irregular terrain where moments of impulsive fleetness mixed with thoughtful pauses. He drew stylish expressiveness from the second movement against a quietly mournful orchestra, and played the finale with fiery virtuosity.
Musica Alchemica
Musica Viva
City Recital Hall, November 11
By PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½
Coming after the sedate polyphony of Renaissance music for the viol, the 17th century saw a remarkable flowering of virtuosity for its close cousin the violin. Nowhere were the technical boundaries pushed further than in the so-called Rosary Sonatas of Austrian composer Heinrich Biber, which scaled new heights of innovation and technique.
Lina Tur Bonet champions this music, bringing it vividly to life with brilliant technical control, flexible rhythmic spontaneity, and a lively imaginative spirit. Playing an historic instrument, she created a golden sound of delicately astringent sweetness with no hint of the scrapes that are sometimes the unwanted byproduct of using authentic gut strings.
Lina Tur Bonet brings the music of the 17th century vividly to life.
She played Biber’s Sonata No. 1 in D minor, The Annunciation while entering down the aisle, with the other members of Musica Alchemica (Marco Testori - baroque cello, Giangiacomo Pinardi - archlute and Kenneth Weiss - harpsichord) already seated on the stage.
With static harmonies, the flights of violinistic fantasy of the first movement might have been an improvisation but were in fact an evocation of wings of the archangel Gabriel, depicted in a miniature illustration placed before the first stave on the immaculately written original manuscript.
Bonet ended the first half with an earthquake; a striking passage of multi-stringed tumult that erupts at the end of Biber’s Sonata No. 10 in G minor, The Crucifixion. Between came sonatas by another early innovator of violin technique Giovanni Paolo Cima and a contemporary of Biber’s, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, decorated with wispy ornamentation, a cadenza and a flourish of light rapidity at the close.
On harpsichord, Weiss played a quiet solo Passacaglia in G minor by George Muffat with focus and discreet control. The second half was framed by two of the twelve sonatas, Opus 5, by another seventeenth century innovator of the violin, Archangelo Corelli. For the Sonata in G minor Opus 5 No. 5, the members of Musica Alchemica, each ever attentive to the smallest nuance from the other players, varied the instrumental mix subtly to explore the delicacy of different combinations.
At the end of the second movement Bonet elaborated a series of closing chords with incendiary arpeggios. In Telemann’s Sonata for cello in D major, Testori created a refined tone of silky mellowness and immaculately polished rapid passagework. Pinardi played a Toccata for lute by Alessandro Piccini with beguiling musicality and caressing touch, fading to nothing at the close.
After a piquant duet by Johann Westhoff for lute and plucked violin, they concluded with Corelli’s Violin Sonata in D minor, Opus 5 No. 12 La Folia in which Bonet bristled with engaged vitality and inner energy that was sometimes held back to enlighten a phrase and elsewhere welled up in volcanic virtuosity.
Oscar
Sydney Opera House, November 8
Until November 23
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★★
Can the life and times of Oscar Wilde – a man so famous for his words – translate to ballet, a wordless art form? The Australian Ballet orders just that with Oscar, its first full-length ballet commission in about two decades, created by the British powerhouse pairing of choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and composer Joby Talbot.
Oscar opens in a riotous courtroom as guards drag Wilde (Jarryd Madden) to prison for the crime of “gross indecency” for his affair with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas (Adam Elmes). As Wilde’s mind unravels in his prison cell, the ballet begins slipping between fact and fiction, past and present, strength and brokenness.
Ako Kondo’s heart seems to beat through her wings.Credit: Daniel Boud
Madden gives the performance of a lifetime as Wilde, holding nothing back – to the point where, as he took his final bows, he broke down in tears. He captures the mercurial, fleet-footed wit and nimble ease of Wilde’s golden era, the voluptuous sensuality of his growing concupiscence, and his final years as an utterly broken shell of a man.
Wilde’s memories are interspersed with narratives from two literary works: The Nightingale and the Rose and The Picture of Dorian Gray. He sees himself in the nightingale’s pure but fatally misplaced love – danced in a delicate hum of energy by Ako Kondo, whose heart seems to beat not through her chest but through her wings. He then morphs into the depraved portrait of Dorian, danced with such dominant magnetism by Maxim Zenin that, even though an illusion, he looms larger than anyone else on stage.
Oscar boasts many of the hallmarks of a Wheeldon-Talbot ballet. It is cinematic and multi-layered, with an eye to robust story-telling and keeping the audience entertained.
Jarryd Madden gives the performance of a lifetime as Wilde.Credit: Daniel Boud
But the nightingale narrative – with its too-literal bird costumes – is clunkily integrated, making Oscar fall short of the conceptual seamlessness of other Wheeldon-Talbot offerings such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or The Winter’s Tale.
What gives Oscar maturity and complexity is its unflinching willingness to explore conscience and consequence. Apart from a hagiographic end for Bosie (historically a troubled and abusive individual), the ballet does not glorify Wilde’s affairs.
It boldly dances them as battlegrounds of conscience, codependency and addictive behaviours incapable of giving Wilde a truly freeing love, destroying himself, his children and wife (danced with glowing loveliness and newfound dramatic depth by Sharni Spencer) and his literary genius. There are, it seems, some stories too achingly tragic for words.
Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers
Liberty Hall, November 8
By JAMES JENNINGS
★★★½
Fans in all black from their eyeliner to their Doc Martens boots, wallet chains and the kind of Aussie-flavoured alternative rock that was huge on Triple J 30 years ago: for anyone old enough, a Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers gig feels like time travelling to the mid-’90s, when this particular strain of music was capable of shifting the cultural needle.
Besides the phones that get whipped out to record the most popular songs, the only thing to offer a stark reminder we’re living in 2024 comes when lead singer Anna Ryan dedicates the song Girl Sports to Donald Trump. “This one goes out to that orange Cheezel-looking motherf--ker,” they say as the crowd boos, “who doesn’t believe women have the right to have autonomy over their body.”
As a song, Girls Sports is a perfect summary of the Canberra four-piece’s ethos of Riot grrrl-adjacent female empowerment: “Maybe you should try sticking to girl sports / And men would like it better if you didn’t talk / Don’t get me wrong you’re pretty good for a girl band / It’s kinda complicated you won’t understand.”
Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers: Neve van Boxsel, Jaida Stephenson, Scarlett McKahey and Anna Ryan.Credit:
It’s heartening to see young people at this all-ages show go absolutely spare at a rock show – something that feels like an anomaly in the current cultural climate. The enthusiastic fan response clearly owes a lot to Ryan’s blunt, take-no-crap lyrics and the proficiency of the band itself – guitarist Scarlett McKahey, drummer Neve van Boxsel and bass guitarist Jaida Stephenson (joined by touring guitarist Meg Holland).
The mix tonight gives a bit too much beef to the drums and bass and not enough clarity to the guitars and vocals – it’s often hard to make out the lyrics – but it doesn’t dampen the tight, punchy and powerful delivery of the songs, which are mostly taken from last year’s well-received debut album, I Love You.
Covers of Billie Eilish and Chappell Roan songs may invoke the biggest singalongs of the night, but Teen Jesus has plenty of bangers to match it: the Strokes-ish I Used to Be Fun, the anguished Treat Me Better and seconds-long scorcher Cayenne Pepper.
There’s no reinventing the wheel, but Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers do what they do well, their support slots on Pearl Jam’s Australian tour this month bringing the ’90s worship full circle.
Scotland Unbound
Australian Chamber Orchestra and Sean Shibe
City Recital Hall, November 9
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★½
The subdued first half began with guitarist Sean Shibe playing wispy ornamentation like highland mist around a quietly bright major-key melody in A Scots Tune from the 17th century Rowallan manuscript of lute music.
The rasping and raucous second half began more aggressively, with great planks of quivering dissonance from electric guitar and amplified string players of the Australian Chamber Orchestra led by Richard Tognetti, as they piled layer upon anguished layer in Julia Wolfe’s Lad arranged by James Crabb.
Misty light and craggy darkness set the parameters for this unpacking of the Scottish soul, which ended with inhibitions thrown aside in arrangements of Martyn Bennett’s contemporary recreation of dance and “bothy” culture (a reference to humble huts of the Scottish highland).
After A Scots Tune, the ACO took up the mood with a haunting quiet melody in From Galloway by James MacMillan, arranged for classical guitar and strings by George Duthie, and imbued with still moments and lush harmonies.
Friedemann Stickle’s Da Trowie Burn, arranged by Crabb, introduced a jauntier fiddle tune and beguiling charm in the cadences. There followed three further arrangements of Scottish songs for string orchestra by Crabb: James Skinner’s lugubrious Ossian, Niel Gow’s soothing Lament for the Death of his Second Wife, and livelier variations on Struan Robertson’s Rant (whose melody is played in Tognetti’s score for the film Master and Commander).
The reflective mood of this half was completed with Canadian composer Cassandra Miller’s concerto for guitar and strings, Chanter, cast in four verses, connected without a break.
It began with low guitar notes followed by dark swirling shadows from the strings. Each verse developed in this way with repeated patterns in guitar echoed by overlapping ripples in the orchestra, gradually moving higher in pitch. Although the mood was disturbed at one point by Shibe leaving to retrieve a forgotten capo, the piece evolved and sustained ethereal calm and glistening delicate stillness, as though to evoke the pulse of the universe.
After interval, Crabb’s arrangement of Wolfe’s piece cleverly orchestrated the overtones of nine bagpipes for which the work was originally written. It moved from the grinding drones, mentioned above, to The Slow Melody, which gradually reintroduced the human element, and The Fast Melody which became increasingly frenetic.
David Fennessy’s Hirta Rounds returned to the quieter mood of the first half, using rapid fluty cross-string textures to create shimmering glow in constant movement like northern lights. Then it was down to earth and a knees-up for the Bennett arrangements, followed perhaps by a wee dram for some of the capacity crowd.
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