Spellbinding Mogwai captivate Opera House plus reviews of the other big shows this weekend

Opera House Concert Hall, May 23

For more than 30 years, Mogwai have made an art out of lulling listeners into a blissful sonic daydream, only to blow their heads off with a burst of volume so sudden and ear-shatteringly loud it’s like sticking your head inside a jet engine.

Take, for example, epic set-closer Mogwai Fear Satan. No matter how many times you’ve heard this highlight from the band’s 1997 debut album Mogwai Young Team, when guitarists Stuart Braithwaite, Barry Burns and Alex Mackay step on their distortion pedals in unison, the impact still shocks, violently shaking the room from the warm cocoon of sound spun by the band only seconds before.

Though this night’s set leans heavily on last year’s The Bad Fire album, it’s also a celebration of the Glaswegian instrumentalists’ 30th anniversary and visits all corners of their career. It begins in understated fashion, the four-piece (plus touring guitarist Mackay) ambling onstage as the pre-recorded spoken word intro of Yes! I Am a Long Way from Home wafts through the room.

Flight Path Theatre
May 22, until May 30

Imagine if Botticelli, a couple of decades after painting The Birth of Venus, had decided to give her a haircut. Edward Albee did something even more radical, albeit with not such a masterpiece. His first play, 1959’s The Zoo Story, was a one-act piece set in New York’s Central Park. Two strangers meet, with Jerry doing most of the talking, and Peter listening. With time, Albee became dissatisfied with Peter’s passivity, and in 2004 he added a prequel act, and At Home at the Zoo was born.

The new act establishes Peter’s life. His wife, Ann, spars with him in time-honoured Albee fashion, being slightly bored with a textbook-publishing husband who offers loving, safe, predictable sex, while she’s besieged by two daughters, two cats and two parakeets.

When she says she wants Peter to be more of an animal, he reveals a teenaged escapade in which he hurt a girl. This sobers Ann out of her sherry-drinking haze, and it sends Peter off to the park, and his encounter with the feral Jerry.

Pinchgut Opera, Roslyn Packer Theatre
May 23,until May 31

Originally written as an oratorio rather than an opera, The First Murder (1707) by Alessandro Scarlatti tells the story of Cain and Abel through six characters: the two brothers, Adam, Eve, God and Lucifer. Rather than setting it in timeless biblical history, director Dean Bryant’s production for Pinchgut Opera has it take place on a modern Australian family summer holiday on an isolated beach, thus drawing out the tension between foundational archetype and family drama.

The obvious danger of this approach is that it over-dramatises everyday situations, such as sibling rivalry, and tries to give them more depth and weight than they can take (aren’t you overreacting a bit there, Cain?). That danger was mollified (if not entirely eliminated) in this production by imaginatively stylised staging, a tightly constrained performing circle (designer Jeremy Allen), ‘doppelganger’ portrayal of the two boys by both actors and singers, judicious live video (Morgan Moroney) and serene musical direction from conductor Erin Helyard that drew tenderness and emotional complexity.

Helyard’s approach never stressed the voices but rather nurtured their natural tone and demeanour. When Adam (Kyle Stegall) and Eve (Sara Macliver) enter with esky and beach chairs, one’s curiosity is aroused even as scepticism remains. Stegall’s voice was smooth with subtle colour and he sang slower reflective phrases with fluid shape while delivering agile passages with energy but without ever distorting the line or pressuring the voice.