This laugh-out-loud 90-minute play is the perfect antidote to your problems

THEATRE
Art
Roslyn Packer Theatre, February 19
Until March 8
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★

Imagine if where you are reading this review was just white space. No words. What if, rather than missing words, the white space constituted a work of visual art? Nothingness would be just as valid as much else that passes for art, after all.

But what if your best friend buys a large painting that’s pure white, and, being painted by a collectible (read “fashionable”) artist, cost an eye-watering sum? Do you accept, question or rubbish this person’s taste? Does the existence of barely discernible (in the right light) diagonal stripes – also white, of course – play into this discourse? Do friendships crack and possibly shatter under such circumstances?

These are the games French playwright Yasmina Reza plays with her three characters in this arch comedy, memorably staged in Sydney in 1999 with Tom Conti, Geoff Morrell and David Wenham, playing Marc, Serge (the painting buyer) and Yvan, respectively.

Now, an equally stellar trio of Richard Roxburgh, Damon Herriman and Toby Schmitz attacks these roles, directed by Lee Lewis for producers headed by Rodney Rigby.

It’s expert casting. Roxburgh intrinsically makes us warm to spiky Marc, who believes Serge is crazy to be sucked into buying an expensive joke. Herriman puffs up Serge with ample pomposity, while leaving ajar the door to congeniality enough for us to allow Serge has every right to spend his money as he chooses.

Schmitz, meanwhile, continues his golden run through Hamlet Camp and Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, giving us an Yvan who’s such an affable oaf of an overgrown child that he could just about paper over the cracks in the Liberal Party, let alone a rift between friends.

Charles Davis’ 1990s costumes excessively delineate the differences between the three, however: Serge in the connoisseur’s garb of tailored pale suit over turtle-necked top; Marc casual in denim and leather; Yvan beyond casual in T-shirt and trackies.

It makes them look improbable friends even before the friction starts to sting, as Reza pokes a stick into the wasps’ nest of taste, meaning, pretension and craft in modern art, and the seeming randomness of stardom. She simultaneously interrogates the nature of friendship, and how we may evolve away from the original bonds.

Lewis has beautifully conducted Reza’s finely tuned score of dynamics, as anger, disdain, hurt and, above all, humour play out, Art being glitteringly witty at best, primarily thanks to Marc when he’s not too poisonous, or Yvan when he’s not too angst-ridden.

Schmitz’s Yvan brings the house to tears of laughter in a diatribe about glitches in devising his wedding invitations. His chums, of course, tell him to pull the plug: they don’t want Yvan lost to the dreaded Catherine any more than Marc wanted to be usurped in Serge’s heart by a blizzard of whiteness.

If the world is piling weights upon you, this will provide blessed relief.

MUSIC
Jean-Yves Thibaudet in Recital
Opera House Concert Hall, February 23
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★★

In a masterful display of musical understanding and pianistic refinement, Jean-Yves Thibaudet kept a packed Opera House audience engrossed for two hours in some of piano music’s most elusive and evanescent thoughts.

Some pieces, in this recital of all Debussy’s twenty-four Preludes (1909-1912), such as the exquisitely comely gem, The girl with the flaxen hair, the efflorescent Bruyeres or the glimpse of fleeting mystery and grandeur outlined in The submerged cathedral, are well known.

Thibaudet played the first two with quiet simple grace, and the Cathedral rose, under his hands, from pellucid calm to imposing solemnity. Others, such as The interrupted serenade, which sketches a disgruntled busker trying to sort out a guitar tune, the music-hall portrait General Lavine – eccentric, or the Dickensian parody, Homage to S. Pickwick, Esq. P.P.M.P.C. (in which God save the King is buried amid skipping hijinks) are accessible through their cheeky humour.

Thibaudet never overplayed the jokes here but allowed them to emerge in their own time, like a smile creeping across a deadpan face. But some of the works, such as the first two Preludes of Book 2, Mists, and Dead leaves, seem to be studies in amorphousness and all that is difficult to grasp.

Thibaudet’s Mists was veiled but beautifully clear, while Dead leaves claimed attention in carefully graded increments as it increased in movement. In all the Preludes, clarity of idea was established through carefully controlled layering of sound, and his playing mixed classic French precision and rhythmic rectitude with subtly caressing sensuality.

And there was contrast aplenty. After the chaste formality of the opening piece of Book I, Dancers of Delphi and the languid stasis of Sails (No. 2), The wind in the plain rushed by in busy precise detail. Thibaudet lingered gently on the phrases of No. 4 ‘The sounds and fragrances turn in the evening air’ (the title is a line from Baudelaire) and allowed the second theme of The hills of Anacapri (No. 5) to take a warm, sentimental turn.

Footsteps in the snow from Book 1 was a haunting study in grey, and made a complementary connection with another chiaroscuro study, The Terrace of Moonlight Audiences in Book 2, which mixed warm sonorities with sinewy chromatic lines.

There were moments of fury in What the west wind has seen (Book 1) and exhilarating effervescence in Alternating Thirds (Book 2). The closing piece of Book 2, Fireworks, crackled and spluttered with sparkling fingerwork, and ended the recital not with a whimper or a bang, but an echo of The Marseillaise, heard at a great distance and in the wrong key. After encores by Elgar and Villa Lobos and a gracious bow, Thibaudet also called it a night.

MUSIC
A Winter’s Journey
Musica Viva, City Recital Hall, February 22
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½
Schubert’s Winterreise is a deep inner journey through despair, reflected metaphorically in the text through poet Wilhelm Muller’s stark images of winter desolation. Despite the frostiness of the terrain, tenor Allan Clayton traversed it with a voice of lyrical freshness, finding power and lightness, fierceness and delicacy to sustain a remarkable unbroken 70 minutes of reflective musical richness.

His voice is naturally attractive with remarkable pitch and tonal precision in both forceful and dreamy passages. Any vibrato adds only vivid colour without heaviness, and he has a stage presence that is both confident and disarming.

His partner, pianist Kate Golla, accompanied the journey with instinctive musical sensitivity to each of Clayton’s utterances, as though anticipating each thought and breath. That would have been sufficient, but in this presentation, first brought to Sydney by Musica Viva in 2022, Schubert’s songs are matched with the Australian outback paintings of Fred Williams, whose spare yet beautiful landscapes are dotted with small, intense eruptions of colour, vitality and joy.

Silhouetted against an L-shaped array of screens, Clayton enacted the journey, dramatically, reflectively, even comically, in a scenario directed by Lindy Hume, moving around, behind and beneath the piano, while Golla sat still in a halo of light against designer David Bergman’s digitally animated projections of Williams’ pictures.

Shapes were isolated, colours filtered and the viewer’s eye was moved around the abstracted landscapes, sometimes resembling a slow panorama from a modern drone.

In Song 5, Der Lindenbaum (The linden tree), Clayton articulated the melody with classic simplicity of line, punctuated by interrogative pianistic phrases from Golla, while Williams’ stark tree trunks turned from black to brown and suddenly developed a bright ochre background as though threatened by fire.

In Song 15, Der Krahe (The crow), Golla’s softly balanced sound of spiralling arpeggios and Clayton’s quietly vertiginous descending lines were heard against a landscape seen from a great height, like the opening of Hitchcock’s The Birds set in a bushfire-ravaged Australian town.

Although visually striking, on returning to this production, I was more troubled than previously by the liberties taken with Williams’ carefully constructed masterworks, and wondered how it would be received if the extraordinary harmonic inventiveness Schubert displayed in this late work were to be subject to similar digital treatment.

Clayton began the cycle from the side of the stage beyond the screens, and pitched the downward arching phrases of Song 1, Gute Nacht (Good night) with aching precision and refinement. He returned to the same place for the final song Der Leiermann (The organ-grinder), ending with neither resignation nor affirmation, but with a question of unforgettable tonal polish pitched into the void.

MUSIC
Stella Donnelly
Oxford Art Factory, Sydney, February 19
Reviewed by BERNARD ZUEL
★★★★

She is that enthusiastic best friend who’s always got something excellent to tell you. Grinning as she approaches maybe, furrowed brow on another day, but always tapping you on the arm or chest like she is bursting to share or to dance. Or both. At the same time. Not surprisingly, you find yourself doing it too, unintentionally mirroring at first, then succumbing to the mood, joining in comfortably.

A bit like the night’s opening song, Standing Ovation, which began as a soft, slow mood piece of uncertain colour that opened out to febrile bass and a skipping rhythm, and all of a sudden we were all singing as if this kiss-off of regrets was a party we did want to attend.

Or maybe it’s the flipside, Year of Trouble, a newish “sad old ballad”, done alone at the keyboards, as forlorn as the night she went back – to regret or rework or just understand – and “Parked far away from your new place/I needed the walk”.

Appropriately communal, this was being done with a reasonably full-figured band of multiple keyboards, multiple guitars and multiple voices – enabling a choice of boy backing vocals stage right or girl backing vocals stage left – and eventually multiple collaborations with the audience, vocally and onstage.

Obviously, it’s not always a pretty story – though Stella Donnelly would probably apologise each time, as if it’s her fault it happened – and sometimes it can get downright ugly. The (appropriately) bitter slicing through offensive men of various shades in the older trio, Boys Will Be Boys, Beware of the Dogs and Old Man, made for a bracing bracket, the first of them coming with a content warning, though for subject matter, not language.

But even then, Donnelly’s not-so-secret weapons, a flair for melodies that could keep a cruise ship buoyant and a turn of phrase that can’t help but catch the ear, will usher you along even the darkest path. It’s why, the Chappell Roan cover in the encore notwithstanding, the best way to think of her wares is to imagine a cross between the sad-eyed adulthood of Holly Throsby and the perpetual teenhood of Ben Lee.

As a final note of serendipity, the fact that Old Man – a song where the sheath is velvet, but the blade is Japanese steel for a certain type of predatory male – was being performed at the same time as a former prince was being taken into custody elsewhere was quite piquant. I reckon that could be a story for her to tell next time. Enthusiastically.

MUSIC
Baroque Masters, Australian Brandenburg Orchestra
City Recital Hall. February 18
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★½

In an age when Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos are busked on street corners, piped into shopping malls and ubiquitously sampled on playlists, it is easy to forget the astonishing originality of Bach’s musical thought in what he modestly called these six Concerts avec plusieurs instruments (concertos with several instruments), humbly submitted to the Margrave of Brandenburg.

Even though most listeners have heard them more frequently than Bach (or the Margrave) ever did, the variety of arrangements and subtlety of musical conversations he found for his “several instruments” remain a wonder and delight.

The Australian Brandenburg Orchestra chose two of their namesakes as mainstays to open their 2026 season. The first half ended with the Concerto No. 4 in G major for violin and two recorders (Bach used the elusive term fiauti d’echo, the exact interpretation of which has provided gainful employment for generations of musicologists).

Concertmaster Shaun Lee-Chen played the virtuosic violin part with freedom and fire, while recorder players Melissa Farrow and Mikaela Oberg provided a glowing aura of sweet sound.

After a haunting slow movement with simply shaped cadenzas from Farrow, the wonderful fugal finale surged with growing exhilaration. Immediately after interval, the Brandenburg Orchestra arranged themselves in an arc for the playful Concerto No. 3 in G for three violins, three violas and three cellos with continuo accompaniment.

Between the bristling outer movements, played with spiky articulation at speed, ABO artistic director Paul Dyer inserted, somewhat incongruously, the theme of Bach’s Goldberg Variations (also in G major) to fill out the two chords Bach wrote to indicate an improvised slow movement (Bach’s chords could be taken to mean he was thinking of a passage in E minor).

To the works by Bach, the ABO added an additional solo concerto in each half. Baroque oboist Adam Masters played Marcello’s Oboe Concerto in D minor with neat seriousness in the first movement and ornate expressiveness in the second. After a genial reading of Pachelbel’s famous Canon in D major, played like an after-dinner jam session, Farrow returned with transverse flute to play, with bright, bird-like agility, a movement of a concerto by Quantz.

The evening’s most carefully shaded and graciously shaped performance was the concert’s opening work, Handel’s Concerto Grosso in G major, Opus 6, No. 1 in which Lee-Chen led the concertino group with intimate attention to line and expressive nuance.

The program closed with a fiery and energised approach to Vivaldi’s Trio Sonata in D minor, Opus 1, No. 12, La Folia, set here in a concerto style, with some variations played by a trio led by Lee-Chen and others delivered by the full orchestra with dramatic abandon.

MUSIC
Lorde
Qudos Bank Arena, February 18
Reviewed by MICHAEL RUFFLES
★★★½

Pants on, pants off, pants on again. A thesis could be written about how Lorde lets cameras and lasers scan her body, focusing on navels and eyes and glitter and scratches, and what the Ultrasound Tour says about being a young female pop star in the aftermath of Brat summer.

But fundamentally, this is intimacy on a grand scale: dancing in the dark like no one is watching, be it a nightclub or a bedroom, just with 16,499 others at Qudos Bank Arena on a school night.

That the 29-year-old singer-songwriter was able to take us along on the alternately hedonistic and voyeuristic journey using mainly downbeat, introspective pop songs is a testament to how good the tunes are.

The staging was simple but effective: two dancers provided engagingly shambolic company, the band had a cameo, and Lorde put her entry in for the award for Best Use of a Treadmill in Pop Since OK Go. But it was essentially a one-woman show, a great singer with top pop songs.

Concussive beats and piercing lasers signalled the start, as Hammer launched proceedings in blunt and invigorating fashion. A cappella start to megahit Royals showcased Ella Yelich-O’Connor’s vocal prowess, and gave a refreshing twist to a classic heard a million times since it launched her career (and half a dozen others) 12 years ago.

Buzzcut Season was also an early highlight, and the risk was it might be all downhill from there.

The new material was patchier: all of 2025’s Virgin album got an airing and while What Was That, Man of the Year and GRWM can stand alongside her best, others were less successful. The robotic Clearblue was an admirable experiment, but unless you’ve had the album on repeat it could have stayed there.

Not that stretching herself as an artist has served Lorde badly: two tracks from the divisive third album Solar Power were among the night’s highlights and gave the setlist nuance and diversity. Lorde finished with early hit Team, the euphoric Green Light and oldest song Ribs, a safe but very sound conclusion.

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