Actor, rapper, activist, comedian: This artist has got the lot

MUSIC
Yasiin Bey
Carriageworks, June 12 and 13
Reviewed by JAMES JENNINGS
★★★★

The man born Dante Terrell Smith has packed a lot into his 50 years on the planet: child actor; leading light of the ’90s “backpack rap” scene when he was going by the moniker Mos Def; activist; podcaster and full circle to adult actor (The Italian Job, TV’s House and Dexter).

Thankfully not sticking to the retirement from music he announced in 2016, the mercurial, idiosyncratic artist who now goes by Yasiin Bey has landed in Sydney for two different shows: the first a tribute to the late, metal-mask-wearing rapper MF Doom; the second a 15th-anniversary celebration of Bey’s own acclaimed 2009 album The Ecstatic.

Yasiin Bey moves to the beat of his own drum.Credit: Jordan Munns

True to form, for an eccentric artist who walks to the beat of his own drum, Bey takes to the stage for both performances in semi-darkness, scattering rose petals from a bag while the DJ plays a mix of bird chirps and electronic bleeps.

Fittingly, Bey – an MF Doom superfan – obscures his face throughout night one, the dexterous rapper tearing through Doom’s heralded discography, pulling chiefly from 2004’s lyrically dense masterpiece Madvillain.

Although there’s an impressive focus on the raps, there’s also a looseness to the performance that’s a treat for those who appreciate artistic flights of fancy: between-song moments include Bey joyfully spinning in circles to some of his favourite songs, spray-painting a mural, and hilarious banter that leaps from Trump’s felonies to the black inventor of peanut butter.

That same looseness may chafe for others: the crowd are oddly muted throughout night one, although for its highlight they enthusiastically clap and add vocals as Bey sings stellar new song Kijani, a sweet tribute to his late mother.

Night two proves that as adept as he may be at covering another artist, Bey is at his best when inhabiting his own songs, the far livelier crowd relishing a front-to-back run through The Ecstatic, an album where the top-tier rapping is almost outshone by A-grade beats powered by adventurous world-music samples.

Gig-goers who like their shows choreographed and delivered with military precision may struggle with the ebb and flow in momentum, but those able to follow Bey’s ADHD-style jumping from dance to rapping to singing to stand-up comedy are dutifully rewarded by a one-of-a-kind talent.

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THEATRE
Stolen
Sydney Theatre Company
Wharf 1 Theatre, May 11
Until July 6
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★

Little children suffer terror with minimal provocation. Dreams, sounds and shadows on the wall will do it, let alone hospitals, war and abduction. Alongside tidal waves of grief, families ripped asunder, all sense of home and belonging annulled and lives devastated beyond salvage, the saga of the Stolen Generations is also one of sheer terror. Ian Michael’s Sydney Theatre Company production of Jane Harrison’s pivotal 1998 play has the power to trigger this sensation.

We’ve grown used to terror – whether in film, fiction or plays – being allied to Gothic horror, but what Michael gives us is more deeply affecting. It has no thrill factor. Renee Mulder’s set is primarily defined by a giant bed and filing cabinet.

Megan Wilding, who audiences are used to seeing in comedic roles, is the standout. Credit: Daniel Boud

Where Harrison’s text called for “five old iron institutional beds”, Mulder gives us just this one, seen from a toddler’s perspective: monstrous, formidable and as cosy as scaffolding. The hulking filing cabinet’s drawers, meanwhile, which lock away forever the secrets of birth, name, family and home, open to become a stairway to nowhere: the destination of too many First Nations lives under this institutionalised “kindness”.

James Brown’s underscore amplifies the impact: sparse, whispered sounds that never venture near the borders of melodrama. Then there are the gigantic, looming, cheerless puppets used to represent the whites who take in the children, with their mouths hissing platitudes to bolster their indefatigable self-righteousness.

The inspiration for this disquieting theatrical ingenuity is all there in Harrison’s vastly imaginative text, with its chronological leaps between the characters’ childhood and adult lives, which, as well as showing cause and effect, magnify the pervading bewilderment and alienation we share.

Her “case studies” are brilliantly vivid. There’s Jimmy (Jarron Andy), who has a penchant for embroiling himself in trouble and is sceptical of his one chance to be reunited with his mother. Mischief becomes trouble with the law, and the outcome is a statistical abomination.

Sandy (Mathew Cooper) is the wise one; the one with a sense of connection if only he can find the right place with which to connect. Ruby (Kartanya Maynard) is brought to the children’s home far too young and subsequently discovers worse inhumanity too young as well.

Anne (Stephanie Somerville), the palest in skin colour, is more amenable to the life offered by her foster parents, but as she grows up, she finds herself too black for the whites and too white for the blacks. Finally, there’s Shirley (Megan Wilding), a stolen child who becomes the mother of stolen children but who at least can bathe away some of her sorrows in the joys of being a grandmother.

STC has so often exploited Wilding’s gift for comedy that it’s fascinating to see her in a dramatic role encumbered with such tragedy and rapture, and she emerges as the standout actor. Andy, Cooper, Maynard and Somerville come to convince and move us, too, but Wilding takes us deep into the world implied by the set and makes us live the terror and the grief, whereas the others merely make us watch it.

Lighting designer Trent Suidgeest’s creation of shadows is at one with the staging and music, especially in Jimmy’s final scene. But that’s the triumph of Michael’s production: all elements are so thoroughly intertwined – even the use of Kevin Rudd’s National Apology to the Stolen Generations. If the other actors rise to Wilding’s level, this will become a distinguished production of an already momentous play.