Funny, surreal and fierce comedy exposes insidious effects of partner violence

THEATRE
Split Ends ★★★★
The Motley Bauhaus, until January 10

A woman falls in love with a vacuum cleaner in Claudia Shnier’s Split Ends, opening in Melbourne this week for a limited season after winning rave reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe and elsewhere in the UK.

What seems like a premise plucked from absurdist comedy transmutes into an extended metaphor that contains sinister and surreal truths drawn from the artist’s lived, and unquestionably traumatic, experience.

That isn’t to say this raw, autobiographical work of performance art isn’t funny. It is, and sometimes wildly so, and the show’s initial gambit provides disturbing hilarity, as well as an insightful glimpse into what it’s like to live with the intrusive thoughts of someone diagnosed with OCD.

The scene sees Shnier considering how to start the play, her decision derailed by multimedia mayhem as unwanted images of her proliferate on a screen behind her, each putting in their own two bob’s worth in a frenetic whirl of imitation and antagonism. Comical effort is needed to deliver content warnings, make the echo chamber of her own mind disappear, and carry on with the story.

Puppetry with household objects continues the compulsive side of the OCD experience, but it’s the vacuum cleaner romance that ventures into terrain that goes beyond mental illness and deep into the tormented subjectivities involved in being caught in an abusive relationship, and psychologically unable to leave it.

Shnier describes becoming (and is) super buff to make up for perceived interior weakness, and combines athletic entertainment – song, dance, physical theatre – with a wrenching descent into a relationship marred by coercive control, sexual assault, and gaslighting.

It’s a labile – and unflinchingly honest – portrayal of the disorienting effects of domestic violence that doesn’t look away from the emotional realities, often baffling to observers and loved ones, behind why victims have trouble escaping from obviously damaging relationships.

That the presence of the abuser appears to have continued to haunt Shnier through the rehearsal process only makes her resilience and gutsiness more compelling.

And for all its comedic shtick, there’s a traumatic residue in her performance that amplifies our relief when the vac is left behind, and Shnier finally pulls the plug on the toxic sucker.

Split Ends is skilled, intimate, fiercely felt theatre. It offers a window into the internal landscape of a mental disorder often misrepresented and misunderstood in popular culture.

And it exposes the insidious effects of intimate partner violence, while showing what hard work it can be to reclaim agency from its shadow.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSICAL
Cats ★★★
Hamer Hall, until 31 January

This production has far more than nine lives. In fact, Cats is now 44 years old; to mark its grand old age, the show is touring the country and has just returned to Melbourne.

This year marks its 40th anniversary in Australia. Playing not in the Arts Centre, but at Hamer Hall, Cats is the first time a full-scale musical is being staged there. The concert hall, with its superior acoustics, is undoubtedly a purrfect venue to house the likes of more than two dozen supersized felines crawling, prowling, preening, hissing, cavorting and yes of course, singing their furry hearts out.

For those unfamiliar with the premise, Cats is loosely based on T.S. Eliot’s 1939 poetry book, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Adapted by Andrew Lloyd Webber, the musical forfeits a straight narrative arc, instead choosing to focus on spotlighting various street cats and their idiosyncratic personalities.

Don’t look too deeply into the plot; there’s some ludicrous guff about an annual meeting of these creatures to determine which one will be chosen to be reborn into a new life. (By what criteria they have to fulfil to be worthy of such an honour is never made clear.)

If you’re here, it’s probably for the costume, choreography and musical compositions. A fair few in the clowder of cats have their moment in the moonlight, accompanied by a live orchestra, with different musical styles to suit the personality of each character, including rock, jazz and blues tunes.

And though yes, the singing is as strong as expected in a production as famous and long-standing as this one, there’s a certain lack of imagination in having each cat front up and do their bit, before slinking away and allowing another one to have their turn. The rest act as a clamouring chorus. Memory is still by far the best (and most memorable) song in the show, which explains why it’s repeated several times.

Against a junkyard set that’s suitably gloomy, with a number of hidey-holes, the cats come out for play. Eliot was inventive with names: there’s Bustopher Jones and Asparagus (both played by Todd McKenney), Rum Tum Tugger (Des Flanagan), Munkustrap (Jarrod Draper) and Old Deuteronomy (Mark Vincent) among the many night marauders.

Most within the ensemble are all of triple-threat calibre but Tim Haskayne as Mr Mistoffelees with his balletic and acrobatic moves and Gabriyel Thomas with her powerhouse vocals as Grizabella deserve special mention.

Cats is pure spectacle (with flashing strobe lighting and pyrotechnics aplenty). There’s no deep and meaningful moral to parse here and no modern renovations to the score, direction or plot. But if you’re after some fluffy content with which to herald the new year or want a kitschy nostalgia hit, then yes, “let the memory live again …”
Reviewed by Thuy On

MUSICAL
Anastasia ★★★
Regent Theatre, until February 20

A perfect storm of misinformation, political turmoil and the collective desire for a fairytale culminated in the legend of Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, who was rumoured for decades to be alive even as the rest of her family – the last reigning monarchs of Russia – were believed to have been executed by the Bolsheviks.

Finding its expression in the 1956 film starring Ingrid Bergman and 20th Century Fox’s first animated feature in 1997, the myth of Anastasia then found its way to Broadway, culminating in the 2017 premiere of the namesake musical.

With music and lyrics by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens – the same two who composed the animation’s score – and a book by Terrence McNally, there’s pedigree underpinning this stage production.

Tsarist Saint Petersburg, post-revolution Leningrad and the swinging 1920s of Paris are evocatively reimagined for stage as a trio of misfits – an amnesiac street-sweeper called Anya and her two co-conspirators Dmitri and Vlad – journeys across the border for disparate reasons.

Linda Cho’s resplendent costuming garb the royals and peasants alike, Alexander Dodge’s set design recalls the grandiosity of the Romanovs’ reign and Parisian splendour with majestic archways and luxurious drapery, and Aaron Rhyne’s ornate projections lend the stage an unmistakeable verisimilitude and dimension.

A rotating skeletal train carriage that the characters cavort around in the travelling sequence is a particular highlight, as is a stunning performance of Swan Lake, where the tensions of the show-in-a-show mirror the anxieties of the central characters at a crucial point.

Donald Holder’s bold lighting ties it all together, bathing cinematic bursts of heightened drama in intermittent swathes of lilac, red and blue, while David Chase’s choreography sees the ensemble break out in spirited displays of Russian folk dancing.

Director Darko Tresnjak’s decision to not have the cast members speak in Russian-accented English sidesteps the potential unevenness of such an endeavour, but the broad American and English accents on display chafe against superbly recreated backdrops that so faithfully recall a specific time in Russian history.

Robert Tripolino brings an impish energy to Anya’s rapscallion love interest Dmitry, while Rodney Dobson is his perfect foil as the jolly, all-knowing fake Count Vlad. Joshua Robson has a difficult role as the sombre villain Gleb, but brings an operatic voice and believable moral ambiguity to the role. Elliot Baker briefly plays the Tsar but it’s in his minor role as Count Ipolitov where he truly shines, while the scene-stealing Rhonda Burchmore enlivens the second act with her physical comedy and irrepressible antics as Countess Lily.

Georgina Hopson as the titular character is curiously flat – not helped along by her uncanny physical transformation into Julie Bishop in the second act – though her renditions of the continually reprised Once Upon a December and Journey to the Past are compelling enough.

Irreconcilable contradictions lie at the heart of Anastasia. Glimmers of clarity and memory puncture the amnesiac princess’s vacuum of remembrance – so much so, she begins to believe she is Anastasia – yet she turns on her two co-conspirators for waylaying her into their so-called duplicitous scheme.

The 1997 film – with its ahistorical supposition that Rasputin cursed the royal family, aided by his albino bat Bartok – is such an absurdist recreation it sits outside the sensibilities of time and space.

The musical hews closer to historical accuracy, but in the process elides the reason behind the Russian Revolution and the Tsar’s abdication, save for an unacknowledged throwaway line about how the common people were suffering under three centuries of autocratic rule.

The scion of an ineffectual monarchy that lived in a gilded fortress with nary a care for its subjects is a fraught heroine to anchor your feel-good musical on, and Anastasia never quite transcends the trappings of history.
Reviewed by Sonia Nair

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