Sex, lies, confusion … and lots of talk about trout

THEATRE
The River
Sydney Opera House Drama Theatre, April 7
Until May 16
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½

When I was about eight, I became lost in a forest, and found it the most exhilarating feeling I’d known. I suspect British playwright Jez Butterworth sought to give his audiences a similar sense of disorientation with The River. Time bends, characters swap places, and we’re at least halfway through the play’s 80 minutes before we start to twig to what’s unfolding.

It does contain moments of exhilaration as it repeatedly presents facets of life as heightened experiences, with the characters electrified by the wonder of what they’ve seen, felt or remembered. This is communicated via a quirky mix of Beckettian concision and repetition, and an unforced poeticism, as when The Man (Ewen Leslie) describes a pool in the river as “gin-clear”, or when The Woman (Miranda Otto) recalls her father dying on the kitchen floor, his body “flip-flopping”.

If that sounds fish-like, you’d be right because binding The Man, The Woman and The Other Woman (Andrea Demetriades) is that they are in The Man’s rudimentary cabin by a river to go fly-fishing for sea trout. In the course of the play, we learn much about the skill and excitement of fly-fishing, while also receiving a glittering discourse from The Man explaining the difference between brown trout and sea trout.

The Man lures both women to his cabin on the promise of trout, but with a side order of sex, of course. The play, meanwhile, examines the proximity of death to life, questions the nature of reality and love, thrives on miscommunication and downright lies, and becomes spooky without being in the least bit Gothic.

Margaret Thanos’ production for Sydney Theatre Company is alive to the play’s intellectual complexities, with Anna Tregloan’s non-literal set and Damien Cooper’s lighting evoking moving nighttime water. Sam Cheng’s music slithers in and out of focus. The three actors have a more challenging time, catching the fleeting glimpses of humour, warmth and truth that surface, then diving beneath the duplicity again.

Once we’re accustomed to the game Butterworth’s playing, what’s missing is a reason for us to care. The Man is as expert with his seduction lines as he is with his fishing lines, and the women seem eager to believe.

While Leslie and Otto carve credible characters from what Butterworth gives them, Demetriades more fully draws us in, partly because of her character’s greater playfulness, and partly due to the springy verbal and physical elasticity with which she releases it.

Perhaps Butterworth wanted us to remain detached, hence the lack of character names, but if he could have grabbed our hearts as he does our minds, The River would be so much deeper.

MUSIC
The Black Crowes
Enmore Theatre, April 8
Reviewed by ROD YATES
★★★★½

The best rock’n’roll is an exercise in perpetual motion. That feeling when a band locks into a groove, controlled yet barely hanging on, sweeping you up in a wall of sound so intoxicating your body can’t help but move.

The Black Crowes are masters of manipulating that unstoppable force.

In moments at Wednesday’s show, such as a glorious Wiser Time, an epic Thorn In My Pride or the soulful cover of The Velvet Underground’s Oh! Sweet Nuthin’, they are transcendent.

Guitarists Rich Robinson and Nico Bereciartua effortlessly trade licks, while the band operate with a telepathy that requires only a subtle nod from musical ringleader Robinson to bring each member back to earth and onto the same page. Lording above it all is his brother, vocalist Chris Robinson.

Harnessing the peacocking posing of Mick Jagger and the swagger of Faces-era Rod Stewart, at 59 the singer still operates with the hip-shaking verve of the man we first met in the video clip for 1990 single Jealous Again.

As they have for much of their career, The Black Crowes look and sound like a band from another era, one unencumbered by the conformist demands of the modern music industry. It’s evident in tonight’s set list.

There are the requisite hits in Hard To Handle, Jealous Again and Remedy, but elsewhere the show is a romp through the band’s catalogue that favours deep cuts and surprises over a reliance on nostalgia. Rather than encore with a hit, they sign off with a cover of The Rolling Stones’ Silver Train.

Instead of weighting the set list in favour of their two most popular albums, 1990’s Shake Your Money Maker and 1992’s The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, they instead air Ballad In Urgency from 1994’s Amorica, Movin’ on Down The Line from 2008’s Warpaint, and Do The Parasite! from this year’s A Pound of Feathers.

Whether trading in volume (Bedside Manners, Stare It Cold) or acoustic Southern balladry (She Talks To Angels), the overriding feeling throughout is one of joy, of watching a band sculpted by experience and time, operating in a world of their own making.

It’s a world we’re lucky to visit.

MUSIC
St John Passion, Sydney Philharmonia’s Symphony Chorus and VOX
Sydney Opera House, April 4
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★

Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and conductor Brett Weymark presented Bach’s St John Passion in a manner that was dramatic but not operatic. This might have raised a smile of satisfaction from Bach himself, since his art inclined towards expressive symbolic narrative, but his employers sternly forbade opera.

Credit for this deserves to be equally shared between Weymark, the choirs (the Symphony Chorus and members of the young-adult ensemble VOX) and the talents of the six soloists, each of whom created their own distinctive musical spells.

Timothy Reynolds sang the speech-like recitatives of the evangelist role (notionally speaking as the voice of John as witness) with eloquent lightness of tone, piercingly sweet upper notes, and persuasive rhythmic flexibility, while baritone Christopher Richardson intoned the words of Jesus with judicious solemnity and depth.

By contrast, soprano Penelope Mills lit up the texture with a bright, ringing sound of well-projected clarity. In the Part II aria, Es ist vollbracht, the emotional centre of the work, mezzo-soprano Ashlyn Tymms created a quietly portentous sound of velvety smoothness and glowing resonance.

As Pilate, bass-baritone Andrew O’Connor mixed rich, deep colour, like the purple of a patrician robe, with expressive human frailty. In the tenor arias, Michael Petruccelli combined robustly taut tone, polished surface and yearning nuance.

The combined choirs sang (from memory) the initial cries of the magnificent opening chorus, Herr, unser Herrscher, with rewardingly open declamation, tapering the repetitions and articulating the figuration with clarity to create a sense of fateful inevitability.

Bach gives the chorus both an active role, as the turba or clamorous crowd, and a reflective one in the chorales and the philharmonia chorus attacked the former with agility and dynamism. Although the balance in some earlier numbers tended to favour the upper voices, the sound in the closing chorus, Ruht wohl, had cohesive, sorrowful splendour.

Regarding the chorales, rather than interrupting the continuity with periodic “hymn breaks”, Weymark wove them artfully into the narrative flow, sometimes picking up on the tempo, volume and mood of the preceding number to carry the drama forward.

Led by Fiona Ziegler, the Sydney Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra established the mood at the start with a texture of grim, undulating turbulence. The arias were coloured by obbligatos on period instruments, while organist David Drury, cello/viola da gamba player Anthea Cottee and the other continuo players varied the accompanying colours from delicate fabric with lute (Stephen Lalor) to interjections of stormy stridency.

DANCE
Flora
Sydney Opera House, April 7
Until April 18
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★★

Flora is a significant moment in Australian arts: the first full-length collaboration between Bangarra Dance Theatre and the Australian Ballet.

Frontlining as choreographer is Bangarra’s artistic director and co-CEO Frances Rings, with a creative team that reads like a who’s who of Australian artists.

The outstanding, cinematic score is by William Barton, the yidaki (didgeridoo) virtuoso, who was last year immortalised in an Archibald-winning portrait.

The dancers are dressed in expressive, luxe costumes by Grace Lillian Lee – the Indigenous designer of the year known for her Jean Paul Gaultier collaborations – with beloved Bangarra collaborator Jennifer Irwin.

And the sets and lighting, evocative of vast Australian landscapes, are by rising stars Elizabeth Gadsby and Karen Norris.

This collaborative vision, rooted in the country’s extraordinary natural environment, furthers a truly Australian artistic identity. And isn’t that, after all, one of the driving purposes of a national arts scene? For this alone, Flora deserves applause.

Flora explores Australian identity and history through 12 eye-catching vignettes of native plant-life. Its best moments are like visual poems, rich in Bangarra’s unique lyricism.

In the opening scenes, a network of roots descends from above, the dancers suspended upside down to represent clumps of sleeping yams, limbs cracking open in a tangle of clay-encrusted hands and feet. Then grasses swirl on stage, with dancers as dusty yellow spinifex crying “tch tch, haaaaah!”

Colonisation is explored through a distinctive portrayal of Sir Joseph Banks’ plant collection: the dancers stand trapped inside specimen bags, bright petals pressed against stark white netting and flickering fluorescents.

The piece closes with an unusually meditative finale, featuring the female ensemble glowingly costumed against a black backdrop, their bright silhouettes capturing the eye-catching architecture of Australian flowers.

As with most full-length works, Flora has weaknesses. The Act 1 treatment of colonisation is gauche, underestimating audiences and compromising its own message with a dancer in a too-obvious Union Jack-emblazoned red coat.

Similarly, I preferred the depiction of hoofed animals in Bangarra’s 2018 Dark Emu. But on the whole, the dancing and choreography is striking, with the 35-strong ensemble clearly inspired by the cross-company collaboration.

Keep an eye out for Jill Ogai’s grief-stricken solo as the golden wattle, and standout performances from Courtney Radford, Elijah Trevitt, Daniel Mateo, and Edan Porter. Principal artist Callum Linnane’s searing intensity is – as always – a highpoint, with Flora one of the last chances to see him before he departs for Hamburg Ballet.

MUSIC
THE POGUES
Sydney Opera House, April 5
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★★★

There are some bands you thank your godforsaken stars to experience live, and bejesus – even without their legendary frontman – The Pogues are one of them.

The ashes of Shane MacGowan, that curse-rattled bard with the tombstone teeth, were scattered on the River Shannon three years gone, but his “rapscallion, angry, weeping passed-out songs” (to quote Tom Waits) and whiskey-soaked spirit howled like a banshee through the Concert Hall on Easter Sunday, turning its docile crowd by the end into a hot-blooded rabble.

We were here to honour the late singer-songwriter, and 40 years of the Celtic punk-rockers’ break-out album, Rum Sodomy & the Lash.

Founding members James Fearnley, Jem Finer and Spider Stacey led the charge, with more than a dozen instruments behind them. There was a brass section, a drum the size of a baby rhino pounded by the Bad Seeds drummer, Stacey’s tin whistle, Fearnley’s “gristle whistle”, guitars, a harp, a banjo, a hurdy-gurdy and more, plus four guest vocalists.

Such a carousing motley was created, it seemed a shame that more drinks weren’t being spilled, bodies lurching or heads knocked together (as per their heyday). That feral live atmosphere and multi-instrumental grind-up you just can’t recreate on any recording, especially not a studio album – not even one as grand as Elvis Costello’s production of Rum.

Lisa O’Neill and Iona Zajac – and Stacey of course – did a bang-on job filling their lungs with the songs MacGowan would have sung. O’Neill, with an almost unearthly plangent voice, got the pride of Dirty Old Town (that popular Pogues cover of 1949 ode); Zajac could get the souls out of purgatory with her caterwaul as a “wild cat of Kilkenny” and her rendition of Poor Paddy.

These fair lasses chased each other around the stage, with other hijinks thrown in as the band got ever more roguish and loose.

The songs on Rum – five written by MacGowan, others traditional – are myth-makers to mighty degenerates, working class anthems, and ballads of lost causes and black-sooted realism. Many speak to disillusion and dissolution in the Irish emigrant experience. A London band they may be, but it’s thanks largely to The Pogues that Irish roots music made its way to modern ears, and to the Opera House.

There was the “cheap theatrics” (Stacey gave a disgusted eye-roll) of the obligatory encore. Then there was a second, bona fide encore. The crowd hollered bloody murder for both.

THEATRE
Till The Stars Come Down
KXT on Broadway, Ultimo
April 1, until April 11
Reviewed by JOYCE MORGAN
★★★★½

Three sisters gather for the wedding of the youngest. Add a potty-mouth aunt, awkward speeches and a wardrobe malfunction, then marinate in vodka.

The set-up feels familiar, but what takes it far beyond the predictable is how it hilariously – yet gently – interweaves the lives of ordinary people with the fault lines of class, family, politics, immigration and climate change. And all without a whiff of didacticism.

A drama centred around three sisters inevitably evokes Chekhov’s Three Sisters. But this isn’t a trio of sophisticated landed gentry living in languid, provincial isolation, but three passionate working-class white women living in a hollowed-out former mining town in England’s east Midlands.

There, they laugh, dance, fight, get drunk, get horny, tear each other apart and dance some more. The title is from a line in W.H. Auden’s poem Death’s Echo.

It’s raucous, messy and brilliantly crafted by British playwright Beth Steel.

Steel has drawn on the down-at-heel region where she grew up, the daughter of a miner. Her hometown was hit by pit closures in the mid-1980s and voted overwhelmingly for Brexit a decade ago.

Yet all this bubbles in the background. As this 2024 play opens amid hair rollers, hairspray and mugs of tea, bride-to-be Sylvia (Imogen Sage) is being readied with help from siblings Hazel (Ainslie McGlynn) and Maggie (Jane Angharad).

Sylvia is getting hitched to a once-penniless now successful Polish immigrant Marek (Zoran Jevtic).

Hazel quips: “Polish … that’s not a language, that’s a Wi-Fi password. It’s just Zs and Ws.” Her casual racism soon becomes more overt.

The first act of this ensemble piece introduces the sisters and their fabulously salty Aunty Carol (Jo Briant).

The men are a far cry from the self-made Marek. The sisters’ father Tony (Peter Eyers), his estranged brother Pete (Brendan Miles), and Hazel’s husband John (James Smithers) are all on the scrap heap.

Some hold tenaciously to the past. Instead of a toast to the newlyweds, Pete recites the names of long-closed pits like an incantation of the dead.

Hazel’s growing resentment is targeted at the immigrants she blames for taking jobs.

While the play’s setting is as specific as the accents (which were inclined to slip around), the problems besetting this family are not. A community where jobs have vanished and resentment of immigrants festers – we could be in Hanson-land.

Sharply directed by Anthony Skuse, the production has strong performances from its central women. As bride Sylvia, Sage belatedly stands up to McGlynn’s bigoted, bitter Hazel. Angharad is outstanding as conflicted Maggie, the sister with four marriages behind her.

With the lion’s share of one-liners, Briant’s Aunty Carol times astutely her blend of witty and shrewd observations.

Jevtic’s Marek made the most of his underwritten role. Peter Eyers’ Tony displayed great tenderness in his affecting scene with his granddaughter.

Part soap-opera, part tragedy, this vivid production is filled with flesh-and-blood characters comically, painfully struggling for a future in a rapidly changing world.

MUSIC
Behind me is the dark
Ensemble Apex
ACO On The Pier, April 1
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★

Gyorgy Ligeti’s music became famous through the ethereal, weightless sections in the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968). Listeners who had scratched their heads at atonal music without melody or toe-tappable rhythm when heard in the concert hall, now suddenly got it when experienced against the cold of interstellar space.

That was two years before his Chamber Concerto (1970), which was the culmination of innovations he had developed during the 1960s after fleeing Hungary and encountering European modernism. As the final work in Ensemble Apex’s concert of varied and intriguing sonoristic soundscapes under conductor Sam Weller, it was, in some respects, both culmination and progenitor.

Shivers on Speed by German-Austrian composer Brigitta Muntendorf dealt with unpredictable fragmented impulses and quivering repetitions across an ensemble of six instruments, alternating between hesitant murmurs and splintering thuds that at times became frightening and frenetic.

By contrast, Januaries, by Australian-born, UK-based Lisa Illean, explored sun-drenched sounds that were dry, intense and spare. Evoking memories of childhood summers in Queensland, it began with an undulating quiet wailing figure, and kept sentiment and sweetness at a distance to create a sense of presence enlivened by glistening moments.

Hrim by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir struck a different tone, beginning with softly howling woodwind and misty stirring tremelos. Passages of sustained high and low notes produced a sense of depth and dark colour interrupted by sudden loud sounds and fading wispiness.

Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto began with curdled textures on woodwind, quickly thickening to rustling sounds on strings. There is a brief outbreak of emphatic unison melody which vanishes as quickly as it emerged. The second movement dwelled on more sustained sounds, introducing warmth from the brass and chords with prominent octaves which evoked quiet stasis. The third movement, impressively controlled by Weller and the ensemble, explored Ligeti’s fascination with mechanical ticking textures (famously exploited in Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes).

In the last movement, some of Ligeti’s spirit and humour erupts briefly as members of the ensemble broke through with brief cadenzas, which darted exuberantly liked unleashed dogs. The movement ended with a wry sideways glance.

It was a program of dedicated concentration from Ensemble Apex, which made thoughtful connections across countries and generations, as though the promises of the postwar avant garde were being finally redeemed by the promising composers of our own time.