A theatrical fantasia so complete I might have dreamt the whole thing

THEATRE
ORLANDO
Belvoir St Theatre, September 10
Until September 28
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★

I dreamt I attended the theatre on a torrentially rainy night, and saw a play based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, her fantastical character who effortlessly swaps and blurs gender, while living from 1588 until modernity. But rather than trying to replicate Orlando, the play was a theatrical fantasia drawing on Woolf’s teeming worlds.

As with all dreams, some details are blurry, although I seem to recall it being adapted by Carissa Licciardello (who also directed) and Elsie Yager. In each new epoch – Elizabethan, Restoration, Victorian, modernity – Orlando was played by a different actor. That’s one of the ways I knew I must be dreaming; that, and the opening Elizabethan sequence, with the Thames was frozen over, and everyone gracefully swishing around on roller-skates.

I seem to recall a Richard Wherrett STC production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Puck was on skates, and another show at the Bondi Pavilion where Lord Nelson’s mother skated, but to have the whole cast of seven doing it could surely only happen in a dream – a dream complete with Shannon Burns’ choreography.

The Elizabethan Orlando was a mere slip of a boy played by Shannen Alyce Quan, who, where I was seated, struggled to project her voice above the deluge pounding Belvoir’s roof. Rightfully stealing this epoch was the Queen, whom, at first, I thought was Elizabeth, herself, until my dream-state convinced me it was Amber McMahon, wearing an outlandish gown, possibly designed by Ella Butler, that spread out like a round table at her waist, and then plunged to the floor to conceal her skates.

Emily Havea was busily breaking Orlando’s fragile heart as Sasha, the Russian princess of no fixed attachment, and Nyx Calder gave us Nick Greene, the poet who rubbished Shakespeare and the rest as upstarts compared with the ancients.

The Restoration transition from Lord Orlando to Lady Orlando required no seven-day sleep, but merely Quan being replaced by Janet Anderson, whereupon Orlando thought herself much improved. McMahon was now an amusing suitor, while Havea sang a crowd-pleasing song (which sounded like Alan John’s admirable work) about living independently of society’s strictures.

Zarif was the androgynous Victorian Orlando, blessed with a voice no deluge could obscure. Despite the delightfully oneiric imagery of black-clad figures adrift in a London fog, this epoch of the adaptation bogged down, except for a lively discussion about marriage without bounds.

Nic Prior played the final Orlando, non-binary and bewildered to be in Tower Hill Station, with strobe lighting (Nick Schlieper’s work) depicting the hurtling trains. Modernity had ceased to be Woolf’s 1928, and had become our frantic 2025.

When it was over, I regretted waking. The dream had caught all of Woolf’s whimsey, while her poeticism was rendered visually rather than verbally. Besides, too many plays are drab naturalism obsessed with that pernicious word, relevance. Give me dreamlike theatricality any night.

DANCE
Song Spirals
Sydney Opera House, Studio
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★

Song Spirals takes its name and inspiration from the book that won the 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction: Songspirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country through Songlines by the Gay’wu Group of Women.

That book was in turn an unprecedented sharing of the songspirals, or crying song stories, sung by the Yolŋu women of Arnhem Land. Known as Milkarri, the songspirals are the cultural keys to intimate ecological and geographical knowledge of Country, also holding profound spiritual power for the Yolŋu: the form through which Country sings back and is remade, and through which identity and life purpose is taught.

The warmth imbued into Song Spirals by its director and choreographer, Yolŋu multidisciplinary artist Rosealee Pearson, is evident in the work’s love and respect for the Milkarri (making it a perfect perfect complement to the must-see exhibition Yolŋu power showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales).

Its sense of Country is beautifully immersive. Andy Grimes’ gorgeous soundscape soothes and evokes, filled with the crackle of fire, twittering birds, running water and ocean waves, cicadas, gentle instrumental harmonies, and of course Yolŋu singing itself .

Pearson’s video and lighting design also transport you to Arnhem Land. There is elegant footage of leaves dipped in fire and rimmed with flame, then images of the land and its people: eyes gazing under water through sea rushes, then through a bird mask in a bush clearing, then through rising smoke. Voiceovers tell the stories, and the passages extracted from the book are deeply poetic. In all this, the live dance for three female dancers - which is tasteful even if it is not highly developed or arresting - seems almost complementary rather than focal.

Song Spirals′ significance lies not so much in the choreography, but in how previously rare it was to have an act of generous cultural sharing, created by and on First Nations women, on the Sydney Opera House stage. A publicly accessible First Nations telling of song stories is long overdue - it is almost 40 years since song stories first captured the non-Indigenous imagination through the British writer Bruce Chatwin, whose 1987 travel novel The Song Lines popularised the term “songline” and topped international bestseller lists. Chatwin, though, never claimed his novel was anything but semi-fictitious. Song Spirals represents a chance to let the storytellers themselves do the talking.

MUSIC
MAHLERFEST
Australian World Orchestra
Opera House, September 4
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★½

The cheers began before they had played a note, as 70-80 musicians (more would follow in the second half) converged from Australia, Asia, America and Europe – wherever they are now working – onto the Opera House stage for the FIFO gathering of the musical diaspora that has become the Australian World Orchestra.

It was called a Mahlerfest but some were already in the mood for an orgy. True they would need to wait for the blazing chorale that concludes the second and fifth movements of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 for the brass to throw away all remnants of inhibition. But the more elegant, sometimes coy Symphony No. 4 provided plenty of eruptive and boisterous passages.

In the first movement of the Fourth, it was the raucous moments that had the edge, as woodwind solos leapt out goblin-like from Mahler’s graceful lines. The approach was rough rather than nuanced. Conductor Alexander Briger encouraged the more angular moments where Mahler seems to want to break up the idyll he has created and, in both symphonies, paid little attention to fine balance.

In the second movement violinist Rebecca Chan, concertmaster for this symphony, ground out the mistuned violin solo (Mahler requires the violinist to play on an instrument tuned a tone higher) against rowdier wind and brass. At times, this deliberately contorted movement struggled to come together.

It was at the start of the slow movement that one was able to sample warmth, first from the lower strings, then from the whole section with oboe (Nick Deutsch). The movement brought some nicely coloured textures from horn, oboe and cor anglais (Rixon Thomas).

In the finale, German soprano Sarah Traubel created rounded soft echoes to her high notes in the refrain, ending with relaxed simplicity (though Briger marred this slightly by holding the silence at the end for an awkwardly long time).

The trumpet solo (Lukas Beno) that began the Fifth Symphony changed the mood to an altogether tenser drama. Briger emphasised the movement’s jabbing accents and Daniel Dodds (concertmaster for the second half) led bristling, energised string playing that the players maintained vividly throughout the work’s seventy-plus minutes.

The second movement was vigorous and tight with fateful trombone sounds, forceful (sometimes over-forceful) brass, and a close of delicate finesse from basses, timpani (Antoine Bedewi) and harp (Alice Giles). Horns and woodwind began the Scherzo with lusty swagger.

Principal horn Andrew Bain stood for the haunting obligato solos that interrupt its momentum later in the movement, though his rewardingly full sound doesn’t need any assistance to be brought forward and there is some advantage in having these passages emerge as if from a distance.

Briger’s beat floated freely in the famous Adagietto, the strings creating a nicely layered sound against harp, apt intensity in the middle section and a welcome hush at the close. As they turned their head for home, the finale was unleashed and unstoppable and it was with the standing ovation at the end that the orgy well and truly started.

MUSIC
OneFour
City Recital Hall, September 6
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★★

Few bands have been forced to wait 10 years and a billion streams to headline in their hometown - but then, few bands are like OneFour. Too much has been written about their gangland credentials but this homecoming show was proof that they are the drill real deal not only in form but also in sound and presence.

City Recital Hall, its refined gates well and truly stormed by the barbarians, is a curious choice, and it is a tribute to the venue’s open-mindedness, and to the ambition of OneFour, that the pairing works implausibly well. With the ground floor seats removed, the stage low-lit and spotlight-free, the effect is dingy garage meets perfect acoustics.

Not that OneFour need perfect acoustics — the poetic patter and play between the four rappers is clear enough to work in almost any setting. But on their more rounded pieces — Luxford, Home and Away, Natural Habitat — the thunderous bassline mates powerfully with the lyrical poetry to produce a sound worthy of the sonic clarity of the room. That drill/trap sound that they have localised so effectively with Western Sydney stories and slang, feels powerfully fresh in this live setting.

The absence of spotlighting - the crew appearing as shadows amidst the dancehall ambiance - breaks down the distinction between OneFour and the audience. The effect is to turn what could otherwise have been a night of triumphalism — having overcome systematic state opposition - into a collective celebration of survival through adversity, band and audience alike.

That opposition has had curious effects — both bad and good. The string of shows cancelled under police pressure has left its mark, most obviously in a curiously short set marked by a lack of polish in their stage presence. But it has also gifted OneFour with a real-life antagonist — the state itself — against which to rail.

Indeed, tension is intrinsic to OneFour’s being. With the police presence at the door surprisingly good humoured and restrained, they turn instead to their fans for tension. In a curious twist on an old trope, OneFour get one half of the audience to scream “F--k you!” at the other half (and vice versa) before getting both halves to Run It Straight. But even that tension — and indeed the whole show — feels warm-hearted and light, as if the sheer relief of making it this far, together, alive, takes the edge off the long, dangerous journey.

MUSIC
Simone Young Conducts Richard Strauss
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Sydnery Opera House, September 3
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★

In the 60 years between the earliest and the latest works on this program, Richard Strauss’s world, and everyone else’s, changed forever. Simone Young began the program with Metamorphosen – Study for 23 solo strings (1945), the sombre meditative work in sorrowful counterpoint, that Strauss wrote amid the physical and cultural destruction of World War II.

One of its themes hints at the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony throughout and Strauss finally quotes Beethoven undisguised in a subdued murmur from cellos and double basses at the end, under which he wrote the words “IN MEMORIAM!”

Young and the SSO strings, led by concertmaster Andrew Haveron, gave a warm and compelling reading held together by close listening between the players, the expressive interweaving of themes rising at times to searing climactic moments. By contrast, Strauss’s Burleske (1885-86) for piano and orchestra is full of Stauss’s (and Germany’s) swaggering ambition in the decades after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

In performance, it demands a wicked, and not particularly subtle, sense of humour. The work begins and ends with quiet solos on the timpani and a considerable part of the pianist’s role in between is to tame that instrument’s exuberance. At a particularly obstreperous moment around the recapitulation, pianist Andrea Lam coaxed it back into polite society with quiet voice and soothing insistence. Elsewhere, Lam played with confident brilliance and bravura.

Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra (1896) sits slightly uncomfortably between the composer’s overconfident youth and humbled old age. Its much-appropriated opening theme (most famously in Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey) stirringly evokes the ascent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Superman which was so debased by the Third Reich that Strauss had initially supported until his interventions on behalf of Jewish relatives and colleagues tainted his standing with the murderous regime.

Young conducted its sprawling structure in broad strokes without overdramatising its peaks or overindulging sentimentality. The most memorable aspect was the finesse of balance from the players in Strauss’s highly original textures. The section Of the backworldsmen grew from intimate warmth from muted strings to a balanced glow as it spread to the full orchestra.

After the intricate turbulence of the sections depicting longing and passion, the Grablied (Song of the Grave) between oboe, cor anglais and solo violin had captured delicate expressiveness, and the section Of science rose from barely audible ruminations in the lower strings to richly scored fullness. Haveron projected exaggerated swaying of the waltz solo in the Dance song with iridescent sweetness edged with a hint of parody. There was much to savour before the cataclysm.

THEATRE
THE BRIDGE
KXT on Broadway, September 4
Until September 13
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★½

What enticing premises for a play: punk-rock, intergenerational conflict and internet-spawned copyright conundrums. Add an actor of Zoe Carides’ credentials, live music and exchanges between in-person and on-screen performers, and The Bridge was packed with potential.

The great ideas, alas, translated into a modest play and disappointing production. I’d hoped The Bridge might just crack the code of an engaging play based on the soggy carpets and raucous excitment of the rock scene, but, like Andrew Upton’s 2007 Riflemind, it lost its way – this time despite (or because of) being a collaboration between three playwrights: Sunny Grace, Richie Black and Clare Hennessy.

Directed by Lucinda Williams for CrissCross Productions, and here having its world-premiere season, the play has Carides playing Amber, a hard-living punk/grunge singer and songwriter of talent, who was so close to 1990s stardom she could smell it. Then she fell pregnant to whichever male groupie it was that night, and decided to keep the child.

Even without the unwanted pregnancy, she was not cut out for playing the game the way a corporatised rock industry demanded. She had a singular capacity for self-detonation at critical career moments, inclining her to spit on the hand trying to feed her.

Fast-forward to now, and Alyssa (Hennessy) is obsessed with the bare-fisted pugnacity of Amber’s writing and her singing. Alyssa toys with TikTok to distraction, and among her followers is Layne, Amber’s mid-20s son (Saro Lepejian), who feeds her a demo of Amber’s finest song, Medea’s Curse. Alyssa turns it into a TikTok hit, with obligatory provocative dance moves.

The cast is completed by Brendan Miles as Phil, Amber’s grasping manager, Andrea Mugpalong, who plays both Amber’s bassist in the past, and Phil’s publicist in the present, and Matt Abotomey, who has three characters, including a very funny turn as a TV talk-show host trying to interview a smashed Amber.

But the play feels too closely modelled on someone’s theory of story arcs, while the dialogue keeps plunging into sinkholes of banality, extracting itself only with a sudden burst of wit or insight. Given this, Abotomey and especially Lepejian cover themselves in relative glory, the latter making Layne the play’s most credible character. Had this level of truth been contagious, perhaps the text’s pitfalls may have been better camouflaged.

Other than in an excellent scene in which Layne films Amber for a TikTok riposte to Alyssa, Carides, who we know can excel, disappoints. She’s more convincing as the Amber of now than of the ’90s, but, ultimately, she doesn’t make us believe enough to sympathise. Hennessy also struggles, although, as is intended, the on-screen Alyssa is more compelling than the on-stage version – until the very end.

Hennessy and Carides co-wrote the pivotal song, Medea’s Curse, and it’s a cracker. The show could still be salvaged, were it reworked with this song and Lepejian’s performance as benchmarks.