Paul Kelly has the whole arena standing for his unlikely anthem

MUSIC
Paul Kelly ★★★★★
Rod Laver Arena, September 6

Paul Kelly is Australia’s unofficial folk laureate, 70 years old and still leaping from the drum riser mid-chord. Tonight is the first night of what he calls a “residency” at Rod Laver (two nights). About 40,000-ish years of storytelling and song on this land, and he’s only got 40, he jokes. But what a 40. He’s backed by a six-piece band, notably including his nephew Dan Kelly on guitar, and backing (and occasionally co-lead) singer Jess Hitchcock.

Before I go on, I have to talk about Lucinda Williams. She’s billed as the support act, but since when do support acts get standing ovations? What we’re getting here is two headliners for the price of one. Williams is a legend of Americana, and a stroke a few years ago has barely set her back – if anything, it helps sell these lived-in, raw songs. One couple I spoke to in my row was actually here for Williams rather than Kelly. Sure enough, they left halfway through Kelly’s set. Sacrilegious and un-Australian as this may seem, it’s a credit to Williams rather than a criticism of Kelly.

Kelly’s set got me thinking about how he’s baked into our national consciousness, and perhaps played a part in forming it. His classic sound, that Australiana we perfected in the 1980s, is all bittersweet jangling guitar and melancholy memories. As he sings on From St Kilda To Kings Cross: “If the rain don’t fall too hard, everything shines just like a postcard.” It’s the Australia that lives in our collective imagination, particularly the Melbourne imagination.

The night leaps with evocative detail, taking in the Northern Rivers, a swimming pool in suburban Adelaide, the MCG, Fitzroy Gardens and the Hume Highway (just outside Yass), name-checking Adam Goodes, the Go-Betweens and Vincent Lingiari. Who else writes songs this sharply and literately about Australia?

The classics are sprinkled through the set, including Before Too Long, To Her Door (the crowd filling in the line, “Walking in slow motion like he’d just been hit”) and Dumb Things, with plenty of room for quieter moments like the sweet When I First Met Your Ma and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, and recent songs like Firewood and Candles and Harpoon to the Heart. And of course, his current single, Rita Wrote a Letter, a sequel to Kelly’s signature tune How To Make Gravy, which may end up being more of a footnote (it’s a hard act to follow).

Gravy gets played, of course. The room lights up, and the whole arena stands up to sing this unlikely anthem, a chorus-less song about Christmas in prison, with a functioning gravy recipe in the middle. The closer is From Little Things Big Things Grow, about the Gurindji strike, as a duet with Hitchcock. It’s one of our great folk songs, simple in its directness and a valuable bit of storytelling.

In the encore, the potently nostalgic Going to the River With Dad and the enduring Leaps and Bounds, set just a leap from the Rod Laver Arena, solidify the version of Australia he’s been singing to us for decades. He’s forever connecting us back to memory, to place, to home.
Reviewed by Will Cox

MUSIC
Eishan Ensemble ★★★★
Hawthorn Arts Centre, September 6

At a time when diplomatic relations between Australia and Iran are unusually strained, and angry protesters rally against immigration, the music of Hamed Sadeghi serves as a quiet counterpoint to such conflict, bringing our focus back to the deeply personal experience of one artist caught between two cultures and two homes.

The Iranian-born, Sydney-based musician plays the tar: a Persian string instrument steeped in classical tradition and history. In Sadeghi’s hands, that history still resonates, but it is couched within a contemporary framework that reflects his current life and passions.

His four-piece Eishan Ensemble is an expression of one of those passions – jazz – and the band’s latest album (Northern Rhapsody) is also inspired by another: Sadeghi’s love of rural Australian landscapes.

The band is currently touring to celebrate the album’s release, and on Saturday night, they performed in the beautifully ornate Hawthorn Arts Centre. The former town hall has a vast performance space with soaring ceilings, but the sensitive lighting and set-up (with the band at floor level rather than on a raised stage) created a warmly intimate feel.

The music, too, was immediately inviting. Sadhegi’s evocative plucked melodies beckoned us gently into his world, like an alluring scent wafting from an open window.

His empathetic bandmates – saxophonist Michael Avgenicos, bassist Max Alduca and drummer/percussionist Adem Yilmaz – deftly shaped the contours of Sadeghi’s intricate compositions, but with an effortlessness that allowed the music to flow as naturally as water.

Avgenicos’ alto sax moved in nimble unison or graceful harmony with the tar, dancing lightly over Alduca’s supple bass figures and Yilmaz’s constantly shifting textural effects on hand drums, cymbals and cajon. The overall mood of the evening was one of subtlety and restraint, though the tunes that closed each set (Nim Dong and Not Really) quickened the pace and deepened the grooves, providing an instant injection of energy to lift the spirits.
Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas

THEATRE
The Lark ★★★
Arts Centre Melbourne, until September 28

Daniel Keene’s The Lark sees Noni Hazlehurst take to the stage as Rose Grey, a retiring publican closing the doors of the establishment she’s worked in all her life.

Her pub – The Lark – is in inner Melbourne, a place that takes its pubs rather seriously. Some suburbs boast one on almost every corner, and although gentrification might have put a few out of business and radically changed the clientele of others, you’d be a fool to underestimate the value placed on these local institutions. (Just look at the public outrage after the illegal demolition of The Corkman by rogue property developers in 2016, and the continuing drama over its reconstruction.)

Australian theatre, too, owes a great debt to these old watering holes. It’s no coincidence that Olive, the tragic heroine of Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, is a Carlton barmaid, and I confess my liver copped a weekly beating in the 1990s – first at Stewart’s, then Percy’s Bar, later The Standard in Fitzroy – among playwrights such as Jack Hibberd (and mad poets like John Forbes) who’d surfed the Australian New Wave and would happily talk your ear off about it all.

Many among that generation are gone now, so the valedictory air which clings to Keene’s monodrama felt especially poignant to me.

Rose’s story has a wistfulness that surges on a surfeit of memory, culled from the decades she spent growing up in (and then running) the pub she inherited from her father.

She regales us with an ubi sunt to the lost that raises its head above elegy to kiss that other thing – regret for the road not taken – and the two strands become inseparable as Rose reflects on her choices, including the decision to care for her elderly, dementia-afflicted dad in his final years.

Of course, Rose herself is childless, single, and over 70. Her very presence, at a loose end in a shuttered pub, begs the question of not just of who she is now, but of who’s going to be there to look after her in the end.

Theatregoers familiar with Keene’s work will find all the qualities that make it significant dramatic art – the sly wit and unexpected flickers of humour, the artfully distilled vignettes, moving observations of how character is shaped by society (and especially by class), and a distinctly philosophical bent not uninfluenced by Beckett.

The existential warp and weft in Keene’s writing needs to be handled carefully. Poetry and the life of the mind occasionally strain against characterisation.

In the hands of an actor of Noni Hazlehurst’s calibre, Rose was never going to come across as a bare mouthpiece for the playwright’s insights, but there are moments in this play – such as when Rose remembers returned war veterans with PTSD – that don’t quite hit a credible and precise emotional chord.

Hazlehurst still commands the stage. This might not be – yet – the kind of tour de force she gave in Daniel Keene’s Mother, but it remains an impressive performance that captures the transience of life through deeply affecting stories, unpretentious wisdom, and a well-judged smattering of earthy humour.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

DANCE
Illume ★★★★
Playhouse, Arts Centre Melbourne, until September 13

Arriving in Melbourne after an extensive national tour, Bangarra’s latest work is nothing if not candescent: a dazzling display of technical wizardry that crowds the eye with novel lighting effects and voluptuous projections.

The work draws on stories from the Dampier Peninsula, centred on the light-bringing culture hero Galaloong. In later scenes it becomes a commentary on light pollution and the disruption of celestial knowledge systems.

With designs by visual artist Darrell Sibosado, Illume has an appealing Indigenous futurist aesthetic, where Manawan trees float like cylindrical abstractions in a coded landscape, and costumes suggest the cybernetic transformation of ceremonial practice.

In one section, a quartet in black robes moves beneath an enormous conch shell, hands rapidly shaping figures around their heads. The music throbs and hums while the dancers trace their cryptic circuitry across flickering points of light.

Such moments are suggestive, but more often it’s the sheer spectacle of the stagecraft that impresses, such as when the stage is flooded with nacreous shimmers, the iridescence of mother-of-pearl.

The scene in which one of Sibosado’s large-scale riji sculptures bursts into flames is particularly impressive. Embers float up into the darkness on one side of the stage, only to float down as a soft rain of ash on the other.

A striking feature of this production is the way it exposes its own apparatus. Smoke machines, rigging and scrims are all plainly visible. What does it mean to project these stories into a space at once technological and imaginative?

But it’s a little disappointing that the dance itself is not asserted more strongly. Rarely do we get moments where the body speaks alone. And the choreography feels safe, short on intensity, distinction and dynamic variation.

Nonetheless, the show is never tedious. Far from it. Engrossing throughout, it carries a dreamy momentum in which time loosens its grip and the performance seems to flow almost without measure.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

THEATRE
The Play That Goes Wrong ★★★
Athenaeum Theatre, until September 28

Comedy that playfully deprecates the artifice of theatre, and the foibles of those involved in it, has been around since Aristophanes; from the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Michael Frayn’s backstage farce Noises Off, the precarity of live performance remains a popular source of merriment.

Few plays accumulate onstage bloopers with such frenetic absurdity as The Play That Goes Wrong, however, and this commercial farce is a hoot partly due to its purity – there’s absolutely nothing high-minded on offer; it exists purely to entertain.

An am-dram production of The Murder at Haversham Manor is the ill-fated show we’re set to see: a commercial murder mystery (a la Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap) in an English manor house.

The deceased, one Charles Haversham, appears to have been murdered in his study. Naturally, the manor is bustling with suspects – Charles’ unstable fiancee Florence, her jealous brother Thomas, Charles’ rakish brother Cecil, and the butler Perkins among them.

Inspector Carter has his own secrets, but he must solve the locked-room mystery before the killer strikes again.

He’s also up against a badly constructed set which, despite emergency repairs from the stage manager, seems hell-bent on maiming or mangling every actor in the show before interval.

While this fictitious acting troupe is obviously under-resourced and under-skilled (the director reminds us of their season of Chekhov’s Two Sisters, and a slimmed-down adaptation of Roald Dahl called James and the Peach), what the show lacks in production values and acting ability, it makes up for in rank enthusiasm.

These thesps have a fanatical devotion to the idea that the show must go on, even when absolutely nothing’s all right on the night, and the plot plays second fiddle to an endlessly enjoyable parade of pratfalls and visual gags, highly choreographed slapstick, and revolving door antics. It’s terrific fun.

I last saw The Play That Goes Wrong in 2017 and there’s indeed room to tighten the screws in this production. Farce is a very technical form, demanding immense discipline and meticulous timing from its performers, and there are a couple of flourishes that don’t quite work as intended.

No doubt these will be finessed as the season progresses, and each performance has at least a few priceless moments.

For all its onstage mayhem and falling debris, The Play That Goes Wrong strikes me as an indestructible comedy, and you’d have to be miserable indeed not to laugh aloud at the ridiculousness of it all.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
Mahlerfest | Mahler 4 and 5 ★★★★★
Australian World Orchestra, Hamer Hall, September 3

Gathering some of the finest Australian players from around the globe, this year the Australian World Orchestra shed a probing light on Mahler’s dark obsession with death and lost innocence, explored in his fourth and fifth symphonies.

Directed by its founder Alexander Briger, the AWO brought appealing lustre and engaging clarity to its playing throughout. Attention to details of balance, dynamics and articulation was well projected in a hall where these elements can sometimes be submerged.

Briger led a tightly controlled account of Symphony No.4, a journey driven by a yearning to return to the joys of childhood. Although beginning with the carefree sound of sleigh bells, the work soon sounds ominous signals, leading to a ghoulish second-movement scherzo to which co-concertmaster Rebecca Chan contributed a well-characterised solo.

At the climax of the achingly beautiful third movement, soprano Sarah Traubel appeared, an angelic vision with her shining blonde hair and dressed in a sparkling light blue gown. This closing vocal movement was a setting of The Heavenly Life, a lyric from the folk song collection The Youth’s Magic Horn. Her voice, like that of a child, filled – but didn’t overfill – the hall, bringing the music to a whispered conclusion.

Such quiet was a perfect foil to the opening of the Fifth with its agitated trumpet fanfare commandingly announced by Lukas Beno.

Briger, once again conducting from memory, whipped up nervous energy in the opening funeral march and into the maelstrom of the second movement.

Andrew Bain’s fearless horn playing crowned the consistently colourful playing in the central scherzo. Plush string tone made the celebrated adagietto a heartfelt reverie, before the orchestra, enthusiastically led by co-concertmaster Daniel Dodds, embarked on the triumphant finale.

What a joy to hear Australia’s elite musicians engage with such demanding but rewarding music.
Reviewed by Tony Way

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