This whip-smart satire puts a bomb under faux feminists

Trophy Boys
Seymour Centre, June 21
Until July 7
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★★½

Gaby Seow and Fran Sweeney-Nash in drag as private school debating boys.Credit: Ben Andrews

In high school debating, and in a certain offshoot of the newly evolved, woke era patriarchy, power is all about knowing the right thing to say.

This is the argument put forward by Emmanuelle Mattana in her evisceratingly dark satire in drag, in which an elite, all-boys debating team scrambles between theory and reality, what’s said and what’s done, to make sure that they’re “on the right side of history – no matter what”.

With director Marni Mount turning the screws as the drama unfolds in real time, The Maybe Pile’s Trophy Boys stops at the Seymour Centre on its national tour after a triumphant first run in Melbourne.

The four Imperium boys are preparing for their final debate of the year. In a lone classroom, in front of a wall of “inspiring women” portraits (Malala, Michelle, Marie Curie, etc) held beliefs and socially approved positions muddle as they try to build an affirmative case for the topic: “feminism has failed women”. Should they forfeit on principle against their all-girls rivals? Try the intersectionality angle? With self-romanticised male feminist and Canberra-destined nerd Owen (Mattana) at the helm, victory is assured.

Cue a comic interlude where they make it rain with palm cards, humping desks to Pretty Ricky’s Grind With Me.

Then a sexual assault allegation lobs a grenade in their strategising. One of them is implicated. Aren’t they too young to be cancelled? With future careers, families, and reputations in mind, there’s now a different game to beat. And a new kind of brotherhood to affirm.

Along with Mattana, Leigh Lule, Gaby Seow and Fran Sweeney-Nash go bone deep for their characters. Lule as the super-privileged, emotionally stunted cool kid. Seow as the “no homo” homo. Sweeney-Nash (sporting a bum fluff ginger moustache) hilarious in their “I love women!” shibboleth.

Clued in to the ugly machinations of privilege, Mattana’s play speaks not only to toxic masculinity, misogyny and homophobia, but also to toxic faux feminism. Drag – often a joyfully subversive tool of gender liberation – is also used to underline, cynically but brilliantly, power’s Machiavellian masquerades of empathy.

Provoked by the 2021 Christian Porter rape allegations, this is a whip-smart challenge by a young queer playwright, a former high school debater herself. Don’t be afraid to invite your male friends.

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KING LEAR
The Neilson Nutshell, June 20
Until July 20
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★

There is no greater play than King Lear. None is more disturbing, nor more moving, and no other Shakespeare work possesses so many characters of note. No role approaches the emotional breadth and height of Lear, nor his apocalyptic and hallucinogenic imagery. Even Othello is not as tormented as Lear, who dies in an ecstasy of grief, the wonder being that he survives until the final scene.

Even more than Macbeth, this is a pagan play, set in an ancient Britain forsaken by the gods because parents and children chew through their sacred bonds and spit them out. After three hours of devotional love, rabid lust, pure evil and unendurable torment, you should walk out dazed, shaken, drained and peculiarly exhalant. Instead, you leave rather pleased it’s over.

Robert Menzies gives us a hyperactive King Lear.Credit: Brett Boardman

Alas, when this ultimate masterpiece arches up towards its many moments of heartbreak and immortality, director Peter Evans’ new Bell Shakespeare production too often shrinks to the school hall: to actors speaking lines whose import they barely seem to grasp.

Evans uses the tight little Neilson Nutshell, the audience on four sides of an oblong stage, and some lines are lost when the actors face away. Shameer Birges (Albany) and Michael Wahr (Cornwall) easily have the best projection, and a command of the language to match.

The upside of being in the round is proximity to the action, which is mighty when fight director Nigel Poulton choreographs such alarmingly real swordplay between Edmund (Darius Williams) and Edgar (Alex King) as has you wincing at each thrust.

Another aspect of being in the round is the absence of a set, and consequent focus on unadorned performance. Yet designer Anna Tregloan has maximised the scant potential, her theme a mix of gold, brass and copper surfaces from the floor to celestial hoops above, hanging panels, and shimmering discs that could be stars or pagan symbols. Her costumes, by contrast, have the actors resembling waiters, and looking awkward when they don robes to herald the past.

Robert Menzies gives us a hyperactive Lear, with little variation in the cadences of his delivery of some of the greatest lines ever penned. If he rises to foaming anger, there’s none of the hopeless meekness of desolation. In Act IV, when he enters “bedecked with weeds”, Menzies catches the humour but misses the pathos. Then, when he encounters Cordelia soon after, Menzies finally softens his tone and softens our hearts, accordingly – but he does not break them. Nor does he break them in the storm scene, nor at the end, when Cordelia is dead. The world does not crack open like it should.

The alarmingly real swordplay has the audience wincing at each thrust.Credit: Brett Boardman

Countless pearls are buried throughout, as when, following Gloucester’s eyes being put out, Regan (Tamara Lee Bailey) delivers the supernaturally cruel “Let him smell his way to Dover”, but says it walking off; doesn’t even emphasise the “smell”.

Melissa Kahraman is a better Fool than she is a Cordelia, making the zany jokes work, even if she rushes some of the equally zany wisdom. Williams gradually becomes more convincing as Edmund, the charismatic nihilist, without ever persuading us that Regan and Goneril (Lizzie Schebesta) would be quite so desperate to bed him. King rises to an adequate Edgar by the end, and James Lugton (Gloucester) at least means what he says, even if he, too, fails to impale us on his torment. Thankfully, Max Lyandvert’s eerie music is there to aid the cause, but, 14 years after Bell Shakespeare last attempted Lear, one might have hoped for more.

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Dirty Three
Enmore Theatre, June 20
Reviewed by MICHAEL BAILEY
★★★★½

Dirty Three have used Boz Scaggs’ Lido Shuffle as entrance music since their last tour in 2019, and the affection of violinist Warren Ellis for the yacht-rock ditty seems only to have grown.

He bounds on this night, windmilling and woah-oh-oh-ohing without a hint of irony, thrusting his groin almost as forcefully as he will many times later when in thrall to his own band.

Dirty Three: there might be a formula behind all the freestyling, but they can still transport a live audience.Credit:

For like any pop songsmith, Ellis and his two foils, Mick Turner on guitar and Jim White on drums, respect a good formula.

Yes, Dirty Three’s reputation for transcendent live shows is built on being in the moment, and there was plenty of improvisation here. The three watched each other constantly to keep tempos on track, or at least Turner and White watched Ellis on the several occasions when, his suit jacket soaked in sweat, he lay down on the stage and played.

But make no mistake, Dirty Three songs are carefully constructed journeys. Take Indian Love Song, a centrepiece of this and every gig they’ve played since forming in Melbourne in 1992.

It started slowly, forebodingly, Ellis plucking a repeating pattern as Turner’s distorted chords eyed the plains, while White, one stick held in a rocker’s-fist grip, the other in underhanded jazz style, built a tribal beat that felt ramshackle but was right-on.

Gradually the intensity increased, Turner stomping a pedal to thicken his sound, Ellis drawing ever longer and more emotive lines, horsehair hanging from his much-abused bow like cobweb. Then, using one of the long-bearded showman’s kicks of the air as a cue, the band laid out except for White’s mallets, and Ellis led us in an ethereal “call” across the prairie.

This peaceful interlude was shattered thrillingly, Ellis returning his fiddle to his chin and unleashing a supernova of sound as Turner’s chords turned coruscating and White pounded rim shots. It was a tempest, yet it never went out of time or tune. Then Ellis’ arm raised triumphantly after a mighty final up-bow, and the thing quickly decayed back into the ether.

It’s a tension-and-release template Dirty Three used many times, but always with enough passion and variation to keep this sold-out, multi-generational crowd enthralled.

There was Ellis’ brief detour into Greek folk melody; the metal-like heaviness of Everything’s F---ed; Ellis yowling into his violin’s pick-up during Sea Above, Sky Below, a song about a trans-Atlantic journey to murder Billy Joel, if you could believe the 59-year-old’s entertainingly unhinged introductions.

The band also played five of the six parts of Love Changes Everything, their first album in 12 years, displaying more compositional variety. I was like a descent into purgatory between Turner’s buzz-sawing and White’s ricochets, IV boasted a memorable and almost conventional violin hook, while V’s celestial rise was abetted by ecstatic keyboard-thumping from Ellis.

But neither love nor money has changed Dirty Three all that much over these 32 years – a fact for which gigs like this make one grateful.

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Master Class
Ensemble
June 19
Until July 20
Reviewed by JOYCE MORGAN
★★★★

She sang like an angel and behaved like a devil. Soprano Maria Callas remains the diva from central casting nearly 50 years after her final exit, at least in popular imagination.

Her appalling behaviour and tempestuous life are at the forefront in this witty production in which Lucia Mastrantone as Callas delivers a “sacred monster” whose cruelty and ego know no bounds.

Lucia Mastrantone as Maria Callas, tortures Elisa Colla.Credit: Prudence Upton

The play is loosely based on a series of masterclasses Callas gave at the Julliard School in New York in 1971-72. I say loosely as there’s nothing to suggest what Callas imparted to her students was an object lesson in humiliation.

But let’s not get too literal. Terrence McNally’s 1995 play isn’t about to dispel the diva stereotype of a woman considered temperamental, bullying and demanding. While there’s no shortage of male principals behaving badly – not only in opera – “divo” simply doesn’t have the same connotations.

With her black fur coat, sleek dark hair snatched into a chignon and trademark heavy winged eyeliner, Callas makes a grand entrance to her masterclass. Her performing career might be over, but she isn’t about to relinquish the limelight. “This isn’t about me,” she declares. Oh, yes it is.

Callas has suffered for her art. And she’s about to make her young students suffer, too. She turns her steely gaze first on the mousy accompanist (musical director Maria Alfonsine) before calling for her first “victim”.

A perky young soprano (Bridget Patterson) barely sings a note before Callas interrupts. Two more students follow, tenor (Matthew Reardon) and a soprano (Elisa Colla). They are easy targets as Callas humiliates them for their appearance, repertoire and even their names.

These scenes are interspersed with reveries and flashbacks as Callas recalls her past triumphs and passionate romance with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who is presented as a figure of hideous vulgarity.

The play is strong on melodrama but short on insight into what drove the singer, and not only into Onassis’s arms.

Liesel Badorrek’s production is most successful in the scenes between Callas and her students. The flashbacks, performed in subdued light over recordings of Callas singing, were less engaging and focused.

The supporting cast of three young actor/singers impressed. When Patterson finally gets to sing more than a note, her rendition of Tosca’s Vissi d’arte – the aria most associated with Callas – is poignant indeed.

But the night belongs to Mastrantone. Her comic timing is finely tuned as she lands withering lines, not least: “Joan Sutherland – she did her best.” Mastrantone puts the malice into Callas.

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American Signs
Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Company
June 19
Until July 14
Reviewed by CASSIE TONGUE
★★★★

“The Consultant is on the beach” sounds like the beginning of a heartwarming story. But in American Signs by Thai-Australian writer Anchuli Felicia King (The Sympathizer), a play not afraid to twist its tongue around the most irritating corporate jargon and fling it at us like a weapon, the sentence is sinister.

“On the beach” is a term for a consultant (like our unnamed protagonist, played by Catherine Van-Davies) who has no clients; it’s a death-knell, especially if you’re new to the job.

The Consultant has no high-flying connections or impressive family pedigree, which is a problem – until a troublingly handsome supervisor tosses her a contract to manage the buyout of an industrial lighting factory.

The play was written for Catherine Văn-Davies and showcases her many talents.Credit: Prudence Upton

From there, we and The Consultant descend into a reality where workers are sacrificed at the altar of data and capital, consulting culture manipulates industry and power for profit, and a privileged, moneyed few unmake and remake worlds.

Kenneth Moraleda directs this disarmingly sleek 70-minute production that reveals itself to be pleasingly knotty, probing, and thoughtful. King’s writing is tight, funny, and furious, and Moraleda develops an interplay between words, perception and image on a set (designed by James Lew) with a mirrored back wall that helps distort perception and challenge point of view. It also allows for a doubled view of Van-Davies at certain angles, which is deeply affecting when we see, and begin to understand, the childhood experiences that have her burying herself in work.

Benjamin Brockman’s lighting is critical here, too – judicious use of shadow, darkness, and LED contribute to a stylish atmosphere that’s closely aligned with the tenor of the script. Sam Cheng’s composition and sound design is just as well-matched to King’s writing: layered with irony and wit (at one point actively mocking our Consultant), but also thrumming, like the hum of electricity, like a light left on too long, with tension.

But the play revolves around its Consultant. King wrote the play for Van-Davies, and it shows off her considerable skill: quick-witted cleverness, dialled-in presence, forthright delivery and a steel-backed, deeply recognisable and deeply human guardedness that, when she allows it to give way to vulnerability, could have your breath catch in your throat.

You can’t help but root for her to find a foothold of success in such a corrupt industry; you can’t help but hope she’ll survive it. American Signs is a brilliant showcase for a strong actor, and a ruthless study of behind-closed-doors power. Could anyone ever really come out unscathed?

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Altstaedt plays Haydn & Tchaikovsky
Australian Chamber Orchestra
City Recital Hall, June 18
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½

Cellist Nicolas Altstaedt tossed out the themes from the first movement of Haydn’s Cello Concerto in C major with light buoyancy, exchanging graciously turned sequences with ACO leader Helena Rathbone with sublime elegance.

In the slow movement he moved through the serene Adagio to a place of scarcely breathing quietness disturbed only by ethereal wisps of hushed stillness. The finale entered a state of exhilarating dynamism in which Rathbone and the orchestra provided a light backbone of support to Alstaedt’s nimble hyperactivity, picking up the energy at the end of phrases like a ball caught in flight.

Visiting cellist Nicolas Altstaedt.Credit: Nic Walker

This was a program which aspired towards the classic, and Haydn’s concerto, coming at the end, embodied the Arcadian spirit it had been reaching towards. The concert had also started with Haydn, but in more agonised mood, with the introductory movement to his cycle The Seven Last Words of Christ.

The ACO played with bold arresting expressive strokes while Altstaedt directed from the cello section. This gave way, without a break to the searing dissonant clusters of the first of three selections from Gyorgy Kurtag’s Officium breve, in memoriam Andreae Szervanszky.

Kurtag’s musical thought is served in compressed fragments of transient vividness that stop after a single utterance, resisting any temptation to extrapolate or explain. The third Kurtag excerpt (one was left wanting to hear the whole work) led straight back to Haydn at his most convulsive – the last movement of The Seven Last Words, Il Terremoto – the earthquake.

The next piece, Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme, Opus 33 for cello and orchestra (arranged for chamber orchestra by Bernard Rofe) looked towards the classic in a nostalgic backwards glance. Altstaedt played the Rococo Theme with reverence, avoiding coy exaggeration, focusing on creating a closely knitted musical conversation with the orchestra, and playing passages of the most fiendish difficulty with eyes searching the horizon like one possessed. The ACO’s engaging, rhythmically intricate performance of Four Transylvanian Dances by Sandor Veress took the concert up to interval.

To start the second half, Altstaedt conducted Aroura by one of the giants of the post-war 20th century avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis. Celebrating the city of Athens, the work embodies architectural thought in its very grain, and Altstaedt’s conducting seemed to accumulate sprung energy from wiry gestures, only to release it explosively, as though hewing off great blocks of textured sound.

The ACO’s performance was taut and monumental and gave way, without a break, to the radiant C major chord as though we had finally arrived at Elysium. Altstaedt prolonged the classic moment with the cello solo from the slow movement of a Haydn’s Symphony No. 13 in D as encore.

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