By Cameron Woodhead, Sonia Nair and Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
This wrap of shows around Melbourne includes the return of a Roald Dahl classic, the debut of a new Australian musical; the haunting, yet devastatingly funny Is God Is; a powerful yet vulnerable gig by one of the finest performers in the country right now; a show that takes a sharp look at sexual liberation; and an inventive play about a woman experiencing “her global 15 minutes of shame”.
THEATRE
The Twits ★★★½
Arts Centre Melbourne, until July 1
How does The Twits fare as children’s theatre? It’s a slick and disgusting success. Framed by dark circus, this production has been designed with a gleeful eye for the grotesque and is cleverly paced to hold the attention of a young audience.
The Twits has been designed with a gleeful eye for the grotesque.Credit: David Fell
Importantly, it is also faithful to the story.
As you probably know, there was an outcry earlier this year over Roald Dahl’s work being tidied up (censored, some might say) by sensitivity readers to remove offensive material, and there was never any doubt that The Twits would be implicated in the controversy.
Offence is its bread and butter. Mr and Mrs Twit are notoriously, hideously, unrepentantly offensive creatures. Dahl made most of his adult characters weird and sinister in some way, but the Twits are positively Rabelaisian – embodiments of disgust who flaunt and revel in their grotesquerie.
Offence is the bread and butter of The Twits.Credit: David Fell
They take delight in vice and ignore personal hygiene – Mr Twit eats scraps of food from his own beard, drinks beer in the morning, and his flatulence reaches emissions levels that would alarm climate scientists.
Mrs Twit is just as nasty. Her cruelty to children and animals is legend, and it is she who kicks off the sadistic tricks the Twits play on each other, in an escalating game of revenge which can only end when the victims of their tyranny break free, hatching a plan to shrink their tormentors to an inoffensive size.
Judy Hainsworth and Kieran McGrath throw themselves into vulgarity, giving outsized performances in deliciously disgusting costume and make-up. Their carnival of stupidity and malice is a sight to behold.
The Twits is a slick and disgusting success.Credit: David Fell
The narration is neatly balanced between three members of a circus – a magician, a contortionist, and a strongman – who also handle the show’s special effects and play minor characters, including the Muggle-wumps, a family of much-abused monkeys who dish out poetic justice.
Propulsive storytelling, horrible humour and offbeat spectacle ensure a well-designed hour of school holiday entertainment.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
MUSICAL THEATRE
Midnight: The Cinderella Musical ★½
Comedy Theatre, from June 25
The latest spin on the Cinderella fairytale, Midnight, isn’t much fun, though it’s worth noting that an original full-length musical is the hardest thing in the world to pull off.
Brianna Bishop as Ella in Midnight: The Cinderella Musical.Credit: Pia Johnson
Australian musical theatre composers have written shows for Broadway and the West End – look at Tim Minchin or Eddie Perfect – and the odd Australian musical (the global tour of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom) has met international success. But art isn’t easy, as the late Stephen Sondheim reminded us, and musicals are a costly and demanding form to get right.
Cinderella has inspired countless musical adaptations from the delightful Rossini opera La Cenerentola to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ill-fated Bad Cinderella, which opened on Broadway in March and closed this month after scathing reviews.
Midnight tinkers with the tale in superficial ways, drawing attention to – and ultimately capitulating to – regressive gender and class politics. That sucks some joy out of the fantasy, and the rest is beaten out of it by an overlong running time and a highly derivative score.
The cast features many of Australia’s most talented musical theatre performers and they give it their all.Credit: Pia Johnson
Most of Midnight feels like a poor cousin to a Disney musical and generally, they need stellar production values to distract audiences from the predictability and fatuousness of it all.
Our heroine, Ella (Brianna Bishop), is a do-gooding merchant’s daughter who helps the poor … while spouting neoliberal ideology! Gina Rinehart would approve of this Cinderella’s politics – she demands lower taxes and small government, not “handouts”, and lambasts the ball as a waste of taxpayer’s money – and look, maybe the billionaire’s patronage might have helped save the show.
Ella desires to meet Prince Charming (Thomas McGuane) as lobbyist rather than love interest. Understandably. The man-boy is so stunted by privilege and narcissism he literally sings a song about himself in the third person.
Ella’s stepmother and stepsisters introduce a potentially interesting family dynamic – the cynicism of a beggared proletariat against Ella’s upbeat incarnation of petit-bourgeois piety – though it’s thrown away by hastily sketched camp villainy.
An interesting family dynamic: Melanie Bird (left) and Verity Hunt-Ballard and Kristie Nguy as Ella’s stepmother and stepsisters.Credit: Pia Johnson
And for all the family intrigue, commoner and royal, Ella eventually turns out to be a daddy’s girl who does secretly long for the prince. The show reveals brittle, reactionary colours, not radical ones, and even the prospect of matrilineal rule fails to lighten the mood.
It isn’t completely terrible. The cast features many of Australia’s most talented musical theatre performers, and they give it their all. Sometimes the strain is evident, but they occasionally work magic moments from ordinary material.
Midnight needs serious pruning, more hummable music and – given the quagmire into which it wades – it should probably have jettisoned engaging with contemporary politics altogether, and just taken unalloyed delight in bringing a classic fairytale to life.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
THEATRE
Is God Is ★★★★★
Melbourne Theatre Company, Southbank Theatre, until July 15
On a barely lit stage, a woman cradling two babies to her bosom appears, a house taking the place of her head. Behind her, a larger-than-life shadow of a man looms. This haunting opening scene hints at the themes that drive Is God Is: motherhood, domesticity, family violence, love and accountability.
Masego Pitso and Henrietta Enyonam Amevor in a scene from Is God Is.Credit: Pia Johnson
If all of this sounds heavy and traumatic, it is and it isn’t. The play catapults 18 years into the future to a light-hearted scene featuring inseparable twins Anaia (Henrietta Enyonam Amevor) and Racine (Masego Pitso) – the former the soft-hearted and emotional one, Racine plucky and fiery – receiving a letter from a mother they long thought dead. Family traumas are relived and tears are shed as the twins learn certain truths about themselves and embark on a mission to “make their daddy dead, really dead”.
It’s a tale as old as time – the unquenchable desire for revenge – but the setting is contemporary, the all-black production MTC’s first.
A simple wooden house is the lone set structure on stage but under Renée Mulder’s exceptional set design, it assumes a capacious, mythical quality. It morphs from the twins’ ailing mother’s eerily lit deathbed, to the blinds flanking a seedy lawyer’s office and to a certain yellow house with teal shutters. To illustrate the passage of time and the bridging of distance as the twins travel from the American South to California, the characters turn the house on its axis as it spins into new locales, new pieces in the jigsaw puzzle of what really happened to them and their mother.
A simple house assumes a capacious, mythical quality in Is God Is.Credit: Pia Johnson
Much has been made of the different modes of storytelling Is God Is combines – from Greek tragedy to Spaghetti Western to Afropunk – and for good reason. Aleshea Harris’s award-winning script is unabashedly black, undoubtedly American and under the direction of Australian power duo Zindzi Okenyo and Shari Sebbens, the play seamlessly shifts between comedy and calamity. You’ll laugh out loud at a funny turn of phrase before the laughter catches in your throat and you’re left agape.
Just as impressive is the play’s further melding of supernatural elements, tenets of the bumbling buddy cop genre as Anaia and Racine attempt to extract information out of the hapless lawyer Chuck Hall (Patrick Williams), and body horror as the play depicts stylised violence.
Exhilarating, devastatingly funny and a rollicking good time, Is God Is chronicles the cyclical nature of violence with a superb cast – each actor steals the show irrespective of their onstage time.
Reviewed by Sonia Nair
MUSIC
Cash Savage and the Last Drinks ★★★★★
Corner Hotel, June 23
“What a moment,” Cash Savage says as she looks out onto a sold-out hometown crowd. She’s in great spirits, belying the crushing content of her band’s latest album, So This is Love, which charts a marriage breakdown.
Cash Savage is one of the finest performers in the country right now.Credit: Rick Clifford
The frontwoman has all the swagger of the prototypical rock star, but strikes a balance between bravado and vulnerability: on stage, she describes the album’s contents as “opening up a chest cavity”.
Over 90 minutes, she shares that intimate world in the flesh, backed by two guitarists, a bassist, keyboardist, drummer and violinist. It’s a big setup that makes for a big sound, and Savage’s powerful vocals are elevated when her bandmates join in on backup on Keep Working At Your Job and Good Citizens. On the album’s atmospheric title track, the instrumentals bloom, the band’s sound cavernous and luscious.
Savage is a formidable performer, a magnetic leader. She stalks the stage as she sings, unencumbered by any instruments herself, and steps over the foldbacks to lurch over fans in the front row and snarl her lyrics.
Power and vulnerability: Cash Savage and the Last Drinks perform at the Corner Hotel.Credit: Rick Clifford
On the frantic Push she jumps off the stage, getting up close and personal as she spits its refrain: “I’m not feelin’ too hot today …” There’s a doggedness in the delivery that is almost frightening.
But there’s joy to be found through the sorrow – the band is clearly having a blast, and Savage’s rapport with the crowd and her bandmates is easy as she bats jokes back and forth.
The musician is adamantly anti-encore, so as the set creeps towards its conclusion there’s a sense of urgency that’s captured perfectly in the speak-singing closer Fun in the Sun. It’s a fitting end to a blistering set that proves why Cash Savage is one of the finest performers in the country right now – what a moment, indeed.
Reviewed by Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
THEATRE
Shhhh ★★★½
Clare Barron, Red Stitch, until July 16
There’s no shortage of kinky sex in Clare Barron’s deceptively funny and unsettling new play – spanking, sex parties, electro-stimulation – but that isn’t what its title is shushing. No, the dirty secret here is that sexual liberation isn’t always experienced as freedom, especially when it intersects with gendered oppression, and that consent in practice still leaves a lot of wriggle room for toxic behaviour.
Hayley Edwards in a scene from Shhhh.Credit: Jodie Hutchinson
Barron is a fascinating voice in contemporary American theatre, and Shhhh is almost a companion piece to Dance Nation – a hilarious and horrible vision of how gender is socialised, viewed through a troupe of prepubescent girls (and one boy) competing in national dance championships.
This one delves into the sexual experience of young women through a similarly disorienting melange of dramatic modes. It starts in pitch darkness, a woman’s voice seducing the listener with the supposed acoustic bliss to be found in household objects, or quotidian pleasures like having a cup of tea.
Jessica Clarke and Peter Paltos in Shhhh, which explores the idea that sexual liberation isn’t always experienced as freedom.Credit: Jodie Hutchinson
It’s unclear whether this is a relaxation tape, or phone sex, or an idiotic new age podcast, or a performative piss-take of all three. What is plain is the overtly sexualised tone – comically sultry, lingering with autoerotic fascination over every mundanity, no matter how trite.
We discover at length it is foreplay to a wake-up call directed at a heterosexual man, the hot but predatory Kyle – played with arrogant charm by Peter Paltos – whose dominating opening monologue relates a Tarantino-like tale in which men’s bodies are ripped apart in pursuit of pleasure.
Is male violence towards men the ultimate source of what happens next? Maybe. For Shareen (Jessica Clarke) it’s a complicated situation. Kyle is her ex and they still have sex; their intimate freewheeling banter works in a casual sexual assault so low-key and normalised that it barely registers with either of them.
Such red flags don’t escape the notice of Shareen’s older sister (Caroline Lee) – a postal worker with a secret who moonlights as a witch. Nor as a writer does Shareen fail to identify them in others.
In one compelling extended scene, she overhears two martial arts students (Hayley Edwards and Jess Lu) frankly discussing the erotic, everything from Wuthering Heights and STIs to a furious screed as extreme as Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto.
Hayley Edwards (left) and Jess Lu in Shhhh.Credit: Jodie Hutchinson
Finding an intimacy untrampled by men requires fantasy: a witchcraft ritual between sisters, or a gentle exploration of kink with a partner (Sunanda Sachatrakul) who never names their sexual trauma.
That silence is one of many lurking in the play: beneath the text; behind moments of coercion only half-recognised for what they are. Under the overheard quality that director Emma Valente draws out in the performances; and from the deepest layers of Romanie Harper’s set: a plush pink playground of the feminine so over-determined that even the toilet is fluffy!
Shit and silence are inextricably woven, and the play speaks louder for knowing how subtle and insidious they can be.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
THEATRE
Underneath Ms Archer ★★½
Louise Siversen and Peter Houghton, St Martins, until July 16
Underneath Ms Archer is far from a smooth flight, but at its best it’s an inventive two-hander – a time-travelling comedy of collision that contrasts the cowardice of public shaming with the courage it takes to confront personal shortcomings.
Louise Siversen plays Kelly, a woman who is experiencing her “global 15 minutes of shame”.Credit: Darren Gill
Kelly Archer is having a day from hell. Her semi-estranged mum recently drank herself to death, and the veteran flight attendant is holed up in her London flat after an incident at work.
In a moment of weakness, Kelly went medieval on an obnoxious passenger and within hours of touchdown, the footage went viral on social media. Soon, online hordes are forming cheer squads and outraged mobs over whether she’s a folk hero or a total Karen.
No turbulence warning could prepare Kelly for her global 15 minutes of shame, but when her life turns I-shit-ye-not medieval – and a 13th-century knight climbs through a space-time anomaly, gabbling wildly in Old English – Kelly has a bizarre mystery on her hands, and in finding the key to it, resolves to face her grief and guilt.
Peter Houghton and Louise Siversen bring their wealth of comedic acting experience to Underneath Ms Archer.Credit: Darren Gill
Louise Siversen and Peter Houghton have a wealth of comedic acting experience. Their play is most lively when it leans into the absurdity of its premise and the scenario isn’t played for cheap laughs, from the way Siversen sketches a stricken sort of cynicism in the opening monologue to Houghton’s alarming eruption onto the stage, his barely contained violence duelling with the solemnity of religious faith ... and the beauty, bewitching to modern ears, of the language of Chaucer.
The design team achieves the miraculous feat of making the medieval world bleed into the contemporary in a way that feels genuinely uncanny, and there’s still plenty of low comedy drawn from the truism that the past is a foreign country. What on earth would a medieval knight make of a mobile phone, a passing car, a packet of Tim Tams … or a woman in modern dress?
Some dramaturgy and dialogue are stilted, though – the play feels at times like the theatrical equivalent of a fold-over story – and the direction could up the tempo and focus more on shaping the interplay between performers.
Underneath Ms Archer is framed as a battle of medieval and modern worldviews, and perhaps it’s valid to think that Twitter pile-ons are a version of putting someone in the stocks – that the global village is still a village in mentality. Yet the play’s conceit can feel like a device, too, for exploring a more recent cultural rupture – between those who, like the artists, remember a world without the internet, and those who do not.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
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