Scandalous revelations and sudden twists await in this Gothic thriller

THEATRE
Rebecca ★★★★
Melbourne Theatre Company, Sumner Theatre, until November 5

Rebecca is the second Gothic fiction from Daphne du Maurier to be adapted for Melbourne’s main stage this year, after The Birds at the Malthouse in May. Both were popular bestsellers made into Hitchcock films, so it’s fair to ask: what can theatre bring to their retelling that film can’t?

In Matthew Lutton’s no-frills adaptation of The Birds, the intimacy of sound predominated. Paula Arundell’s almost conspiratorial storytelling coaxed audiences into the claustrophobic monodrama; audio tech immersed us in the horror of unexplained avian attacks individually, creating a private, and deeply unnerving, soundscape for each spectator.

Anne-Louise Sarks’ Rebecca has frills. This is commercial theatre with elegant production values, poised and atmospheric design, a formidable cast, and a script that allows the seeds of this legendary romantic thriller to bloom into morbid flower.

An unnamed young woman (Nikki Shiels) meets grieving aristocrat Maxim de Winter (Stephen Phillips) by chance in Monte Carlo. A whirlwind romance leads to marriage, and she moves with him to Manderley – a stately manor home by the sea in Cornwall – where she quickly falls under the shadow of Maxim’s recently deceased first wife, Rebecca.

As the severe housekeeper Mrs Danvers (Pamela Rabe) begins to manipulate the new lady of the house, Maxim becomes remote and emotionally withdrawn. All roads point to Rebecca as the cause. Is Maxim still in love with her? How could anyone ever live up to Rebecca’s reputation for feminine perfection? And how, exactly, did Rebecca die?

Scandalous revelations and sudden twists await as the woman probes the secrets her haunted husband is hiding from her.

Design elements fuse into a triumph of Gothic sensibility: the brooding insistence of the sound design (Grace Ferguson and Joe Paradise Lui); Paul Jackson’s nimbus-smeared lighting; Marg Horwell’s astute eye for period fashion; and the visual precision behind each scene change, every mist and mirror.

Shiels inhabits the insecurities of the heroine, her vulnerability, and her descent into domestic horror with compelling presence. There’s a jolting character transformation that might be more credible had it been achieved in a more graduated way, but the romance opposite Phillips holds your attention, and I particularly enjoyed Shiels going toe-to-toe with Rabe.

Long before her award-winning role in Wentworth, I’ve wanted to see Rabe as Mrs Danvers. It’s ideal casting, and Rabe’s husky apparition turns into a creature of flesh and blood as it builds a sapphic subtext (disallowed by censors in the Hitchcock movie) to the character’s deranged obsession. The fetishisation of the feminine, and the power play between the two women, has a transfixing, performative quality that reminded me a little of the murderous sisters in Jean Genet’s The Maids.

And it’s Mrs Danvers, interestingly, who gives the staunchest rallying cry regarding social freedom for women. Sarks appears to deny no perspective on the sources of psychological horror in Rebecca, tantalising us with possibilities. It’s thought-provoking, even if they don’t all coalesce into effective drama.

Newcomers to Rebecca might strain, too, to make sense of plot twists hastily telegraphed towards the end. It’s a bumpy climax after such a smooth ride to get there, though a small flaw in an otherwise slick, solidly crafted entertainment.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

DANCE
Manon ★★★
The Australian Ballet, Regent Theatre, until October 22

The latest restaging of Kenneth MacMillan’s sprawling three-act Manon by The Australian Ballet is big, busy and beautifully drilled. And yet, despite fine performances by all the leads on opening night, this lumbering brute of a ballet remains a hard work.

Yes, Manon is a classic. It’s a ballet that can be seen the world over. Its appeal, however, lies less in the sureness of its narrative development and more in the hectic bustle of its various settings – and in the starriness of its four main roles.

Based on an 18th century French novel, the ballet is about an impoverished courtesan who is pushed and passed around, pulled to her knees and ill-used by everyone she meets until – weary of the constant manhandling – she dies.

The most arresting passages are the most lurid: Manon’s seduction by an ageing patron, abetted by her pimpish brother, and the brothel scene with its series of spectacular lifts. These remain interesting. But that’s MacMillan: he’s most inventive when someone’s getting jumped.

Robyn Hendricks is very good at this stuff because she brings out the tragedy of it: the poised carriage, head slightly tipped back, the arching spine. She combines sensuality with a sort of quiet anguish, as if forever pierced by darts – of desire or desolation.

Her Manon is not particularly vivacious but she has pathos. Other Manons this season include Benedicte Bemet and coryphée Grace Carroll, who joined the company 16 years after Hendricks. We should expect very different performances from each of them.

What MacMillan struggles with is the relationship between Manon and the nebbish Des Grieux. Callum Linnane partners Hendricks confidently, but the main duets – although they’re well shaped and musically neat – feel dramatically undercooked.

The secondary schemers are more fun. Maxim Zenin’s Lescaut is a lovable rogue – quick, witty and impish in attack. And Isobelle Dashwood is eye-catching as his mistress: tall and graceful but also funny, especially in the drunken duet with Zenin.

It feels every bit of its more than 2½-hour length. There are group dances galore and variations, as well as many heavy touches of verismo. Is that child working in the brothel? Well, it’s all part of Manon’s operatic largeness.

Conductor Charles Barker gets a ravishing sound from Orchestra Victoria. Those intimate but faintly menacing pieces such as the Nocturne from La Navarraise, used in the second act, are particularly effective – perhaps the most delicately human things in the whole ballet.

Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

JAZZ
Christopher Hale Ensemble ★★★★★
The JazzLab, October 12

For well over a decade now, Melbourne musician Christopher Hale has immersed himself in the study of traditional Korean drumming. Hale is not a drummer – he’s a bass guitarist – but he has found ways to adapt and incorporate these rhythmic traditions into his own playing and compositional practice.

Hale’s latest project is based on his own personal interpretation of hohŭp, a Korean rhythmic concept based on breath and body movement. But while his study of this elaborate system has academic leanings – he’s written an entire thesis on it – the compositions that have emerged from his study are far from abstruse.

At JazzLab on Sunday, Hale spoke briefly about his interest in ritual music from Korea, but didn’t mention hohŭp or the related methodology he’d developed for his own music. Instead, he embodied it – quite literally. We may not have understood or even registered the rhythmic intricacy at play, but we could see and feel the pulsing undulations in Hale’s bass lines and torso. Drummer Simon Barker (also a master of Korean drumming) was equally expressive, resembling a languid cowboy leaning back in his saddle while his arms flew around the kit with explosive power and immaculate control.

Meanwhile, saxophonist Jamie Oehlers and pianist Brett Williams fashioned clear melodic lines and beguiling harmonies to counter the music’s rhythmic complexity. Both could shift from introspective lyricism to muscular vigour with ease, enhancing the music’s emotional impact.

Several tunes moved through multiple moods, building from graceful solo or duo introductions to propulsive groove-based themes, dropping into hushed interludes or creating sweeping extended codas that became more soulful, more majestic and more impassioned with every repetition.

With Oehlers based in Perth and Barker in Sydney, this is an ensemble that will require considerable commitment to keep together. But this project (like so many of Hale’s creative endeavours) is unique and compelling enough to be worth the effort.

Reviewed by Jessica Nicholas

DANCE
DanceX Festival Week 1 ★★★★
Playhouse, until October 11

The DanceX Festival is a curious beast. The Australian Ballet – that bastion of a prestige art form – has built a festival for the whole sector. Everyone – or nearly everyone – has a place at the table.

And yet, it doesn’t feel like a festival. There’s not a lot of buzz and the Playhouse was far from full at Wednesday’s opening.

The timing doesn’t help because DanceX is wedged between the Australian Ballet seasons of Prism and Manon. So it doesn’t have much oxygen. It also overlaps with the Melbourne Fringe Festival, with its own diverse program of dance offerings.

Audiences should come anyway. There’s a generous selection of shorter works. The standard is very high – these are works that have toured repeatedly – and the contrasts are instructive. It amounts to a welcome digest of where Australian dance is now.

A notable international guest, the Royal New Zealand Ballet, offers an excerpt from Te Ao Marama, created for the company’s 70th anniversary by Moss Te Ururangi Patterson. It’s an intriguing experiment in which the haka form is combined with more lyrical material.

Restless Dance Theatre’s Seeing Through Darkness is welcome programming. The company’s inclusive ensemble is accompanied by live violin and cello. It’s the most polished work I’ve seen from them, but it still left me wishing the company would take a few more risks.

Balanchine’s Allegro Brillante is performed by artists from The Australian Ballet and The Australian Ballet School. Charming, yes, and a bit schmaltzy. It’s performed with speed and some feel for the music. Nonetheless, it looks a little stale on these dancers.

The standout piece is Lucy Guerin’s Ground Control. If Samara Merrick is plausible but not dazzling in Allegro, here she is a galvanic phenomenon: focused, precise and attractively strange. She proves an ideal interpreter of Guerin’s art of the uncanny. The four dancers first work themselves into the floor, sinking their feet as the arms flicker. Then there’s shift when Merrick puts on her pointe shoes. Now we see structures melt away as she wafts into the darkness.

The evening closes with an excerpt from Dancenorth’s Wayfinder – that effervescent rainbow fantasy from Townsville. Honestly, every evening of dance should finish with something from Wayfinder: it’s the surest way to send the audience off with a smile.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

MUSIC
Trio Isimsiz ★★★★
Musica Viva Australia, Melbourne Recital Centre, October 7

Blending youthful verve and bonhomie with seasoned intuition, Trio Isimsiz (Turkish for “trio without a name”) made this concert deeply pleasurable. Bookended by two great masterpieces (Brahms’ Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 101 and Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat major, D. 898), the program centred on the Melbourne premiere of a new trio by contemporary Spanish composer Francisco Coll.

Brahms’ third and final essay in the piano trio form is highly compact; its four movements last just over 20 minutes. From the start, the trio fanned the music’s smouldering embers of passion into flame, confirming a solid collective commitment to their endeavours. Beautifully hushed playing in the inner movements caught the ear, along with some wonderfully resonant pizzicato before the fiery finale.

Commissioned for Trio Isimsiz, Coll describes his 2020 Piano Trio as kaleidoscopic. Moving from textural fragmentation to cohesion and back to fragmentation across its four movements constitutes a form of musical cubism. While an engaging and highly imaginative work, with allusions to Richard Strauss and flamenco, there is perhaps too much reliance on the piano to glue the texture together, apart from one spotlit moment for cello. Nevertheless, the dedicatees convincingly rose to the work’s considerable technical and expressive challenges.

Schubert’s evergreen trio sent the audience out on a high. After revelling in the buoyant optimism of the opening, the players revealed the poignant slow movement as the beating heart of the work, inhaling tenderness and exhaling a gentle melancholy. Deft, delicate touches in the scherzo led to a final rondo full of playful energy.

Pianist Erdem Misirlioglu, an astute chamber musician with technique to burn, violinist Pablo Hernan Benedi with his sweet, well-projected tone and cellist Edvard Pogossian’s musical handling of his gloriously rich-sounding instrument have certainly made a name for this “nameless” trio.
Reviewed by Tony Way

MUSIC
The Tallis Scholars ★★★★★
Melbourne Recital Centre, October 5 and 6

Melbourne turned on a rock star welcome for The Tallis Scholars, who, over half a century, have come to epitomise the classic English choral sound. Possibly because of the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall’s warm acoustics, the city is the only stop on this Australian tour, favoured with two concerts by the revered ensemble.

Such bounty enabled capacity audiences to savour the group’s stylistic versatility with music from 12th century abbess and mystic Hildegard von Bingen, through to contemporary American composer Nico Muhly.

While some fans may have considered the absence of English music from the Tudor period conspicuous, there was much other fine music from the 15th and 16th centuries to enjoy.

Emma Walshe expertly spun out the glorious high Cs in Gregorio Allegri’s crowd-pleasing Miserere, supported by the group’s customary razor-sharp intonation and limpid diction. Another Tallis Scholars speciality, Tomas Luis de Victoria’s six-part Requiem of 1605, also plumbed great emotional depths. Director Peter Phillips unleashed plenty of Latin fervour in an evocative reading that cut to the heart of this powerful pondering of life and death.

Classics such as Clemens non Papa’s Ego flos campi and Josquin’s Praeter rerum seriem rubbed shoulders with lesser-known gems, including Crecquillon’s Andreas Christi famulus, Obrecht’s Salve Regina and an eight-part Credo by Gombert. A sprightly Deus in adiutorium by Spanish Mexican priest Juan de Padilla added further delight.

Sung by an angelic quartet of female voices, four short chants by Hildegard provided interludes in the second program.

By contrast, works by living composers included Muhly’s 2023 commission A Glorious Creature, full of engaging brightness, while the quiet intensity of Arvo Part’s Triodion and Da pacem Domine were set against the insightful strength of his Magnificat.

Purcell’s Hear my prayer, with its plangent dissonances, and Pearsall’s exquisite Lay a garland were perfectly chosen encores. As with the rest of the music, these were animated by the enviable passion and precision for which this ensemble is famous.

Due to the illness of one ensemble member, Melbourne bass Lachlan McDonald landed a dream job as a stand-in, blending seamlessly with the other singers.

Melbourne Recital Centre forfeited a massive opportunity for music education and did its reputation as a quality music venue no favours by failing to provide a proper printed program containing program notes, texts and translations for this “signature event” – the only blight on an otherwise radiant pair of superb musical experiences.
Reviewed by Tony Way

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