Cultural elites skewered as mayhem descends on dinner party in new David Williamson play

THEATRE
The Social Ladder
Ensemble Theatre
January 28, until March 14
Reviewed by JOYCE MORGAN
★★★½

From Macbeth to August: Osage County, the dinner party that unravels has long been a theatrical trope. Veteran playwright David Williamson uses this to fine comedic effect, taking aim at his favourite subject – status-obsessed Sydney.

This time he skewers how the city’s wealthy garner power and cultural cachet through appointments to boards of arts institutions.

Social climber Katie Norrie (Mandy Bishop) wants a seat on one of the most prestigious: the Art Gallery of NSW’s fund-raising foundation. She has a plan to win her glittering prize.

She invites Sydney’s most influential couple to dinner. Pillars of the establishment, Catherine (Sarah Chadwick) and Charles Mallory (Andrew McFarlane) are major art collectors and on every elite cultural board in town.

Desperate to impress, Katie has borrowed an Arthur Boyd masterpiece, hired a celebrity chef to cook, and invited a lefty filmmaker friend and his teacher wife to join them. What could go wrong?

Pretty much everything – but no prizes for guessing that. The glee is in watching just how slippery the rungs on this social ladder will be.

On a sparse stage, the first three scenes swiftly set up the three couples ahead of the crucial dinner party in this tightly plotted play.

Katie has grown up in the Shire and never shaken her working-class accent. Her husband Roger (Johnny Nasser), born into wealth, has little patience for her social ambitions and has a beef with Charles Mallory.

Mallory is a ruthless billionaire; his wife Catherine has a cut-glass English accent that conceals her humble roots.

Ben (Matt Minto) and Laura Gregory (Jo Downing) have been dropped from Katie’s social circle for several years and are sceptical of why they’re suddenly back in favour.

As the dinner party is poised to get under way, Katie’s home is revealed in its bright, brash glory. The hostess in an eye-popping confection and Catherine in sleek ivory are delicious visual contrasts. Veronique Benett’s pitch-perfect set and costumes are a joy to behold.

As the dinner party descends into alcohol-fuelled mayhem, anti-woke Charles clashes with Ben over diversity and unions, with Laura over tax avoidance and with Roger over business dealings. Secrets are disclosed – not least about that wow painting. Bitterness and recriminations ensue.

So, too, does some Bollywood dancing. For amid the havoc, much fun is to be had in this light-hearted comedy.

The three couples are stock types who argue their positions effectively, rather than fleshed-out characters. But the dialogue is sharp, there are laugh-out-loud lines, and Janine Watson’s brisk direction maintains the pace with her capable cast.

Bishop is terrific as the brazen Katie, whose grand plans become smoking ruins along with the roghan josh. Chadwick impresses as the imperious Catherine, as does McFarlane as her shameless old bull of a husband who can’t say no to an income stream.

The ending is upbeat, although Roger’s volte-face comes out of the blue.

This is classic Williamson, replete with witty observations and great one-liners. It tickles the funny bone and pricks the bubble of privilege.

THEATRE
God’s Cowboy
Flight Path Theatre
January 28, until February 21
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★

At some point, I started to wonder if I’d fallen into an alternative universe. Had I hit my head on the way to Flight Path, that quaint little Marrickville theatre with its surprise overhead aircraft crescendos? Had I lost my powers of comprehension?

With queer love and sexual trauma the preoccupying themes, this debut play by stage producer Les Solomon resembles a conceptual sequence of soapy non sequiturs, scudding awkwardly into a middle distance. Or, perhaps, a lame steed that could not be brought to water, and so wanders into the desert. God’s Cowboy idled several years in development and really should have remained in purgatory, instead of saddling up for this year’s Mardi Gras.

Characters describe and behave towards each other in ways that not only don’t make sense, they profoundly baffle. The plot gropes towards a non-collapsible shape. The more provoking scenes, involving intimate boundaries being crossed, are not always discomforting in ways that are productive and justifiable. And the ‘memory play’ framing device suffers from amnesia, with the middle section seeming to forget that the story began in a fourth-wall-breaking flashback narrated by twins Peter (Nathaniel Savy) and Penny (Sophia Laurantus). When another flashback was deployed didactically at the end, the audience startled.

The gist of it all: our young sibling pair are relating to us the time when they were both cast in a play of their own, and so crossed paths with fellow actor Daniel (Max Fernandez), a Midnight Cowboy-inspired gunslinger lead.

First of all, it’s odd that Fernandez got the role of this ‘dark and mysterious’ stranger when the impressively toned and charismatic Savy seems far more suited. But it’s also confusing why either of the twins are drawn to the character of Daniel at all, given his repertoire appears to be making people feel uncomfortable with slimy drawls, snickers and an aggressively cavalier attitude towards sex. Yet, almost in the blink of an eye, we witness the earnestly angelic Peter, a lover of old-timey musicals, fall in love.

Somehow, “illiterate f--- nugget” becomes the phrase that breaks the ice and bonds them. Peter had just hurled it at Daniel after (mistakenly) suspecting him of assaulting his sister. And now they’re on the bedroom floor laughing.

Penny’s subplot of her own queer romance feels perfunctory and wholly underdeveloped. There’s another character, Demetrius (Tate Wilkinson Alexander), whose function is to prowl around with sly and shady intent.

Another bizarre logic connecting events occurs between the two acts. Daniel, a former sex worker and the victim of horrific childhood abuse, has for a split-second been overtaken by the demons of his past, and turned monstrous himself when Peter is at his most vulnerable. Peter initially won’t even talk to him. Then he’s performing a gorgeous balletic dance for him. Then he’s insisting Daniel meet his parents.

There is another scene in which we see Daniel in the play-within-a-play monologuing about how God wants us to fornicate; to be unashamed of our “manacondas” and “penis fly traps”.

The coup de grace at the end is a sentimental and improbable callback to Peter’s favourite movie, Carousel. At last, it was over.

OPERA
Hansel & Gretel
Opera Australia, Joan Sutherland Theatre, Opera House
January 27, until February 25
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★½

Sydney rejected the composer Engelbert Humperdinck when he applied to become the first director of the Conservatorium in 1914. The fact that Australia had gone to war with Germany just after he submitted his application might have had something to do with it.

But Sydney has been more receptive to Humperdinck’s most famous work, Hansel & Gretel as demonstrated by the warm audience reception for this revival by Claudia Osborne of the 1992 production by one of Opera Australia’s best-loved and most frequently revived directors, the late Elijah Moshinsky.

Humperdinck’s achievement was to combine the simplicity of easily memorable, folk-like melodies with harmonic sophistication and an ability to develop musical ideas without overworking them. With a predominantly female cast (there is only one male role) and a children’s chorus, the sound-world is bright, leavened with richer and darker colours by finely-crafted orchestration. Whether the Grimms’ story cuts through with today’s young people I am unsure, but, in the absence of social media, one has to do something.

Margaret Plummer (Hansel) and Stacey Alleaume (Gretel) drive the action with childish naughtiness and deft musical finesse. Plummer creates the obnoxiousness of little boys with gentle humour and sings with a voice of crimson depth and clarity. Alleaume’s Gretel darts with playful mischief, fine filigree and silvery vocal delight. In Moshinsky’s conception, the mother, Gertrud, in the libretto by Adelheid Wette (Humperdinck’s sister), becomes a harassed scolding stepmother (thus enabling a moment of poignancy in the dream sequence of Act 2).

Helen Sherman projected the Stepmother’s role firmly, injecting stridency into the sound when the children were particularly irritating. Shane Lowrencev sang the father’s rollicking tipsy entrance song with robust tone and carried the role with lusty flexibility of line.

Jane Ede was a fearsome Witch, singing with ringing clarity so that the voice lingered in the head like the foreboding laughter of an unfavourite great aunt. Shikara Ringdahl sang the Sandman’s song with unassuming simplicity.

Kathryn Williams’ cameo as a clear-voiced Dew Fairy was supported by the clumsy awkwardness of a ballet-school troupe. Humperdinck subtly subverts the expectation of a surging operatic peroration by giving the final apotheosis to a children’s choir, which the Opera Australia Children’s Chorus delivered with nicely shaded pastel colours in quiet moments and sparkling clarity at the close. Conductor Tahu Matheson unfolded the musical narrative without exaggeration and the Opera Australia Orchestra nurtured the score’s finery with warm sound from horns and lower brass.

In the first act Mark Thompson’s set is a claustrophobic cottage which becomes oversized in Act 2 as though the children had fallen asleep hungry after the scolding and all the nonsense no more troubling than a dream.

DANCE
SISA-SISA
Bankstown Arts Centre, January 23
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★★

The double bill SISA-SISA (Indonesian for “the remains” or “remnants”) marks the Sydney Festival debut of the extraordinary husband and wife duo Murtala and Alfira O’Sullivan, co-directors of the Indonesian cultural company Suara Dance.

Comprising two autobiographical solos, SISA-SISA represents long-awaited recognition for the couple, who have spent years channelling their energy into dance troupe choreography.

Both husband and wife possess an artistic maturity that makes its presence felt immediately: the kind that sears with intense honesty and a stage presence earned after only decades of experience.

O’Sullivan’s work, Jejak & Bisik (which can be translated to “traces and whispers”), explores O’Sullivan’s life as an ageing female dancer caught in the crosshairs of unrelenting professional demands, motherhood and community leadership, and a traumatic misdiagnosed miscarriage.

As O’Sullivan changes costumes and fixes her hair on stage, her mobile phone buzzes with voice messages while emails from a management company pop up on-screen. A polite corporate voiceover reads them out: As O’Sullivan’s profession is relegated to “the multicultural stage” and deemed unsuitable for “mainstream” white Australian audiences, it will be subject to various constraints including a fee reduction. Could she create a dance piece for a conference, sandwiched between the Monday morning speaker and the keynote speaker, designed to keep people awake? Using her community troupe? For less than $500? During a period when she is recovering from reproductive surgery?

O’Sullivan, blessed with a striking natural glamour, demonstrates a beautiful sense of embodied theatricality and poise as she communicates this emotional journey.

Murtala’s piece, Gelumbang Raya (which can be translated as “the Great Wave”), is his danced memory of recovering the bodies of victims of the Boxing Day Tsunami. A local of Aceh, Murtala returned after the tsunami as a disaster relief volunteer, working with survivors and — quite literally — staring death in the face as he carried thousands of bodies out of the mud.

Gelumbang Raya is haunting in its rawness and urgency, performed on a stage strewn with sand and visual projections of tides washing in and out. It incorporates Acehnese body percussion, singing, and the frame drum — 11 of which lie buried in the sand, like lives frozen in time by the tsunami. One of the piece’s final images — Murtala, lifted upside down in a head stand amidst the sand, singing in a piercing tenor as the drums lie around him — lands like a rip in your gut.

THEATRE
asses.masses
Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House
January 24, until January 25
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★½

By the fourth hour, you’ve entered a state of trance. Your communal gaming herd is cheering on a self-elected temporary controller who’s playing a version of Guitar Hero in the Sydney Opera House to help a donkey maximise its fornicating delights.

This is Sick Ass, one of many donkey avatars, who’s just reached the Astral Plane (aka donkey heaven) as a casualty in the worker-animal uprising. What began as a peaceful protest against the human overlords’ exploitative machine-first system went horribly wrong, leading to death, displacement and disunification within the movement.

Your own ass is getting sore. Level complete, you all break for snacks.

The audience may have thinned after the third interval, with another four hours to go. But those who are spiritually invested for the long haul in this multidisciplinary, multidimensional epic and graphic radical allegory are all in – and rewarded for their loyalty. Travelling through farm and village, circus and abattoir, nightmare and nirvana; through hundreds of ass puns and inventively obscene animations, while conquering button-mashing challenges and philosophical puzzles, we become a pack immersed through live social experiment in a stunningly rendered universe – comrades in a common goal towards “true progress”, united by the liberating mindset of play.

Canadians Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim are behind the asses.masses project, brought to Sydney Festival for one weekend, and touring as far as Finland, Istanbul and Chicago next. Conceived with vast ambition, a collectivist sensibility and total nerd passion, it’s a unique animal of modern participatory theatre, using the language of video games and dorm-room humour to tell its staunch and timeless revolutionary tale.

The game art is truly dope. The “material world” is built with nostalgia-infused pixels, its textures, dialogue boxes, tessellated realms and soundscapes recalling Legend of Zelda or Pokemon. The “astral plane” is of the realism style, transporting us to sublime desert canyons (where donkey souls rave) and rolling infinity pathways (where the player-crowd yells “don’t do drugs!” when a power-boost orb appears). Classics games such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man are built into the narrative to either create obstacles, or simply offer fun little inconsequential diversions.

For example, we spent a gleefully inordinate amount of time in the mines getting the donkey foal avatar (whom we voted to name Bitch Ass) to play a version of Pong called Rocks. Later, another controller has Hard Ass hoof-kick a swarm of riot policeman dead a la Karate Champ. The difficulty level ramps up on our quest, with veteran pros stepping up to earn our thunderous applause.

Far closer to Animal Farm than Animal Crossing, there are some intentionally lurid depictions of violence, particularly against humans – from the life-like screams of burning villagers, to a factory worker getting eviscerated by his own meat hook. Most hilariously macabre is a grim, surreal sequence in which Hard Ass has to sacrifice himself many times to create a corpse bridge for/of himself over a bloody trench.

Obviously, with scores of people in the room, not everyone gets (or wants) a go at the controller. The majority are basic spectators – our ‘agency’ limited to adding to the cacophony of yelled dialogue options and directions, jokes and commentary. More theoretically than actually active, the player-herd moves through cycles of elation and fatigue, agony and ecstasy, frustrated boredom and shared jubilation. The durational aspect can take you to the edge: at one point I found myself cry-laughing at the excessively cautious way a controller was moving a mutinous gang of equines hidden inside packing boxes. During the seventh hour, we spontaneously rose to our feet to sing the “song of ascension”, a donkey funeral dirge.

Would I have better enjoyed this marathon on a friend’s sofa, where we could have a more equitable share of the controller, and partake of snacks superior to Doritos and dry vegan buns? Sure. But enjoyment isn’t the only marker of a worthwhile experience. Sometimes you have to endure the discomfort to come out the other side, finding yourself, in some way, new.