This remarkable new play refuses to look away from a collective blind spot

THEATRE
Break of Day ★★★★
Malthouse Theatre, until August 29

Over the last few decades, much of our most important drama has laid siege to the myth of Australian egalitarianism. That’s true across all domains of social prejudice and marginalisation – gender, race, sexual orientation, and so on. Yet, all of these can intersect with economic disadvantage, and as the Gini coefficient continues to rise, so too does theatre that refuses to look away from the have-nots.

Steve Rodgers joins such internationally lauded playwrights as Patricia Cornelius and Daniel Keene in focusing with great human intensity on a collective blind spot: those living at the wrong end of increasing wealth and income inequality.

Break of Day is set in the fictional Burra Creek – an impoverished exurb of a satellite city, where single mum Pam (Kat Stewart) works night shift at an Amazon-style warehouse. We first see her walking home from work, through a monologue that touches on her invisibility, but which also highlights an opposite risk. One doco about Burra Creek was a voyeuristic slide into poverty porn: it smeared the community as all “booze an’ meth an’ KFC” and not much else.

Pam’s daughter Rae (Sherry-Lee Watson) is in year 12 at high school. She’s bright enough for university (and the social mobility that goes with it), and Pam is desperate to ensure that she seizes the opportunity.

The deck is stacked against Rae: her obnoxious alcoholic grandfather (Richard Piper) descends on their one-bedroom flat, and her computer packs up while she’s trying to write an essay about Nabokov’s Lolita. Plus, there’s the teenage distraction of first love with charismatic Jed (Theo Clarke), who wants to be an actor.

With Rae’s future at stake, Pam will risk everything – including her lifelong friendship with her work supervisor Sanjeeva (Chum Ehelepola) – to help her daughter make the grade.

Sarah Goodes’ sensitive direction – and the layered ironies and intimacies of Rodgers’ brilliantly overheard script – underpin some wonderful performances.

Kat Stewart takes a scene or two to descend the social ladder and work herself into potty-mouthed precision, but once she does, it’s a compelling portrayal of a woman so rich in the one thing money can’t buy that she’s willing to collude in her own debasement. (Pam’s desperate love is also an existential evasion: who will she be once her daughter flies the coop?)

More debased still is Piper as the abusive grandfather. It’s a piteous, fearlessly awful performance, and a sign of the playwright’s gift for dramatic irony that he allows this character to announce the crux of the issue –

Thinks she’s so f—in’ special. She’s got rights! Everyone
now, everyone’s got rights, all these f—in’ rights! –
Except for poor people. Nothin’ people! Poor f—in’ nothin’
people have still got nothin’…

– after a despicable misogynist rant aimed at his granddaughter.

That said, bleakness doesn’t reign in this play, largely thanks to two younger actors stealing the show. You can’t look away from either of them – not the extraordinary ferocity and tenderness that Watson brings to the precocious Rae, nor Clarke’s magnetism and ease as an Aboriginal boy who’s a born performer.

(One highlight sees Jed practising a Caliban speech from The Tempest to soothe himself as he’s mucking out a toilet. The scene floored me, and there isn’t much I wouldn’t do to see an actor as talented as Clarke perform Shakespeare.)

Delight isn’t restricted to the young: Ehelepola paints an overlooked character in deft strokes – a mild-mannered and restrained persona, trauma under the mask, and, crucially, a moment of unexpected joy.

Anna Cordingley’s set is a revolving monument to Pam’s home and workplace and the liminal spaces between them. It frames the actors well and creates a powerfully circular momentum, though you do wonder about the cost.

Will such maximalism push ticket prices up so that the poor won’t be able to afford to attend the show? It’s a troubling to think that they may be excluded from the world premiere season of this remarkable new play.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE
The Nightline ★★★★
Malthouse Theatre, until August 29

A COVID lockdown was announced on the opening night of Melbourne’s 2021 Rising festival. Roslyn Oades’ The Nightline was one of the many events cancelled, though it’s since appeared at arts festivals across the country and in Canada.

Five years later, Melburnians finally get a chance to join this secret club of strangers in the night, in an artistic intervention that might inoculate audiences against another strain of disease: epidemic loneliness.

The premise of this performance installation is disarmingly simple.

Oades and her collaborators have set up “The Nightline” – a special hotline where anonymous callers can leave voice messages in the wee hours. These post-midnight missives have been continually recorded, collected and fed unfiltered into a vast message bank (and you’ll get the number on a card as you leave, so you can contribute to the project as a caller if you desire).

During the performance installation, you’ll get to eavesdrop on a diverse sample of these night-owls and insomniacs in a choose-your-own-adventure style format.

Audiences ascend fire-escape stairs to access a clandestine location. We’re instructed not to speak, then enter a room overrun by serried ranks of individual desks. Each desk has a rotary phone, a switchboard, and a lamp on it. Once you sit down and pick up the receiver, you lend your ears to the night. You can engage in deep listening, or surf through audio channels at a whim.

One dominant theme is the sleep-deprived confessional. Some callers to The Nightline treat it a bit like late-night talkback radio (without the inconvenience of anyone talking back), and the first message I overheard was from a middle-aged man involved in the criminal underworld. He began with words to the effect of: “I’m not gay, but…”

As an openly gay man, this was a familiar, touching, repellent, and achingly raw and sad secret for me to hear. Yet the chorus of those needing to share unspoken suffering roved widely – from a woman enduring the rigours of breast cancer treatment to the voice who revealed, haltingly, that they’d unwillingly gone without human contact – no one had noticed them at all – for an entire day.

Not every message is strictly confessional. There are prank callers, seekers philosophising about their lives, and terrible insomniacs documenting their sleep hygiene.

Yet between the callers’ mask of anonymity and the retro listening environment, a peculiar intimacy and authenticity are encouraged to emerge from the darkness.

In fact, The Nightline reminded me of the (fictional) late-night student radio show from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. That postmodern masterpiece involves the hunt for an underground film so entertaining that it kills anyone who watches it; and the radio show is its guerrilla counterpoint – a space for human connection and empathy, as unexpected as it is restorative, amid the collective sorrows of a world obsessed by the morbid pursuit of distraction.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
Massive Attack ★★★★★
Rod Laver Arena, August 11

Since forming in 1988, Massive Attack has made a couple of the greatest albums of all time and nudged the top of the pop charts. They also have a decades-long history of anti-war and human rights advocacy, most recently for Palestine.

They were recently detained in, and then banned from, Singapore after expressing solidarity and unfurling a Palestinian flag on stage – contravening a ban on displaying foreign flags. This was just prior to arriving in Australia, home of our own cool and normal discourse.

Now that we’ve addressed the elephant in the room, we can move past the ugly business of politics and talk about how much fun we had at the Massive Attack show.

Just joking! Of course that’s not what happened! Anyone hoping for an uncomplicated night of nostalgia at the paranoia factory would have walked away disappointed. Likely crawled away, with ears, eyes, and brain bleeding.

Music takes a back seat on this tour. The players, including core members Robert “3D” Del Naja and Grant “Daddy G” Marshall, perform mostly in the shadows, ceding the floor to a visual experience that’s equally mesmerising and assaultive.

As the first bars land, morbid statistics cascade across the screen: children killed by guns in the US this year, in various wars. It rarely gets more cheerful.

AI surveillance, hate speech, influencers (Australian wellness grifters get a shout-out), aspiring fascists, conspiracy theories, tax havens, K-pop dance routines juxtaposed with government massacre. Whenever the audience is threatened with a good time, it’s followed by apparently limitless footage of war crimes committed by some of Australia’s allies.

A nightmarish tour of the internet gives way to a map of Palantir’s chokehold on the planet, then to the Congolese children mining the minerals behind it. Cumulatively an overwhelming panorama of the digital psychosis engulfing the world, soundtracked by Massive Attack.

The band itself? Note perfect. Especially when feature artists emerge from the shadows to lend themselves to tracks.

Roots reggae singer Horace Andy laces Hymn of the Big Wheel with gravitas. Deborah Miller sings Shara Nelson’s parts on Safe from Harm with such transcendent beauty and power the crowd roars with every high note. Former Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser’s ethereal, haunting voice is undiminished, both on the Tim Buckley cover Song to The Siren and show closer Teardrop.

A panacea of a song at any time, but when the screens finally go dark and politics leaves the room for three minutes, it tips towards the sublime.
Reviewed by Liam Pieper

MUSIC
Jaime Conducts Mahler 6 ★★★★★
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Hamer Hall, August 13

Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 is a work of stunning clairvoyance. Although happy at the time, Mahler conjured up a hero hounded by death who is ultimately felled by three fateful blows. Five years after the premiere, Mahler was dead at the age 50, having indeed suffered three blows: forced resignation from the Vienna Opera, the death of his young daughter, and the diagnosis of fatal heart disease.

Under chief conductor Jaime Martín, the Melbourne Symphony brought vibrant urgency to the rich musical and psychological textures of this troubled masterpiece.

Largely balancing the need for observing Mahler’s minutely detailed writing for huge forces with broader dramatic imperatives, Martín revealed Mahler’s hero to be a deeply complex character.

In driving the opening death march with such implacability, Martín created a sense of suffocating imprisonment that meant the second theme (intended to evoke Mahler’s wife) was not so much a lyrical contrast as a reminder of the shortness of happiness.

Moments of yearning for lost innocence were beautifully captured by luxuriant string tone and the distant ringing of cowbells in the Andante (placed as the second movement according to Mahler’s final wishes) only to become torturous in the sinister scherzo, where elements of fear, regret and self-doubt re-emerged.

Martín respected Mahler’s superstitious omission of the last of three devastating hammer blows in the finale, even though there is a strong musical case for its reinstatement. Demonstrating huge commitment, the orchestra brought this colossal emotional maelstrom to a devastating close.

Cameos by concertmaster Natalie Chee and principal horn Nicolas Fleury were indicative of the orchestra’s superlative playing throughout.

Yorta Yorta composer James Henry’s Freshwater Saltwater was a skilfully orchestrated prelude, using the blending of fresh and salt water in the Yarra as an analogy for the co-existence of cultures both here and in Mahler’s Vienna.
Reviewed by Tony Way

DANCE
Echo Mapping ★★★★
The Substation, Newport, until August 15

Echo Mapping, an intimate solo dance performance that is also a concert, has the cool austerity and high-art seriousness of a late-night gallery event. It’s therefore perfectly at home at the Substation, amid the attractively exposed concrete, iron and brickwork.

The space is shared by dancer Azzam Mohamed and composer Jack Prest, with the latter stationed behind a music desk. Both appear in plain T-shirts and nondescript trousers. Staged in the round with the house lights raised, the performance has a refreshing immediacy.

It begins in silence, with Mohamed holding a sequence of still poses. Then Prest offers a clean, affirmative three-note trumpet figure. Momentum gathers rapidly: Mohamed whoops and shouts, stamps out a rhythm, then breaks into a compulsively repeated jazz-dance phrase.

When this subsides, Mohamed again draws his extremities inward. He clenches. His hands twist into fantastic shapes around his head. Then loosens himself, more gradually, finding elasticity through a recurring motif in which his hands, arms and shoulders knead the space before him.

Prest builds his score from simple inputs, accumulating layers and effects while also incorporating snatches of tunes supplied by Mohamed. The dancer maps this changing sonic terrain through variations of joy and languor, hips rocking and dipping as he spirals around the room.

The show has an improvised sort of energy and yet as it winds down, returning to the sonorous minimalism of its beginnings, the logic of its development becomes apparent. Mohamed seems to replay the performance in reverse, retracing its gestures until, once again, all becomes still.

Perhaps the most interesting detail in Echo Mapping is the relationship between the artists: throughout the performance they treat each other with a gentle but undemonstrative masculine regard – inhabiting different worlds but sharing a boundary in the event of their collaboration.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

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