Miraculous: This play in a tiny theatre shouldn’t work but it does

Behzod Abduraimov began the expansive solo that begins Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No 2, Opus 16 with sinewy arching phrases over an underlying pulse that pressed forward with fateful inevitability. In the second theme, Abduraimov etched spidery lines against the orchestra with steely articulation and mordant irony.

When the opening idea eventually emerges again from the spiky, sometimes amorphous development section, Prokofiev turns it into a solo cadenza of monstrous proportions in which the implacable rhythmic tread of the opening is continuously assailed by waves of fearsome virtuosity and splintery dissonance.

Abduraimov played it with formidable power, shaping the structure with ever-growing intensity, stemming the surging tides with phlegmatic command, while never losing sight of the poetic intent.

The second movement was demonically fleet and the third created great looming gestures of exaggerated grotesqueness. In the central section of the finale, he drew back from the outrageous difficulties of the framing sections to allow space for a quiet melody of touching simplicity.

Abduraimov is the perfect pianist for this work. Although the orchestral part is sometimes thickly written (and was not without small perilous moments), he cut through with flinty strength, while retaining a deeply ingrained rhythmic sense and a musical imagination that spans pensive inner moments and wild courage.

To start the concert, conductor Ha-Na Chang had led the SSO in a furiously vivacious reading of the Overture to Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila, emphasising the broad beat and overarching ebb and flow while the SSO sweated the detail.

In Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, Opus 64, after interval, she maintained a sense of driven urgency in the first movement and avoided excessive emotionalism, focusing instead on more subtle shadings such as the ominous growl from the double basses as the movement closes.

Guest principal horn player, Guillaume Tetu played the second movement’s famous solo with a sound of velvety roundness, while concertmaster Andrew Haveron led climactic moments in the strings with focused intensity, and drew out the space between beats with micro-delays to create telling, but not overdone, expressive flexibility.

Chang’s reading of the third movement had subdued whimsicality with a hint of playfulness in the return of the symphony’s portentous motto theme in the closing bars. The last movement marshalled stirring grandness without recourse to over-indulgent extravagance, leaving the sense Tchaikovsky had been salvaged from the excesses of some of his devotees.

SWITZERLAND
Ensemble Theatre, May 7
Until June 8
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★½

As Shakespeare did with his protagonist in Richard III, Joanna Murray-Smith plucked Patricia Highsmith from history, dropped her on a stage, and started pulling strings. Biographical drama is seldom compelling when it’s excessively reverential toward historical fact. The truth of what happens on stage counts for more.

The play places the famed author of the Ripley books in her final phase in the Swiss Alps, draws on her real-life cantankerousness, racism and alcoholism, and then throws an unwanted visitor into her den. The audience need know nothing of Highsmith because that visitor, Edward, from her New York publishers, helpfully fills us in on the writer whom Graham Greene dubbed “the poet of apprehension”.

Murray-Smith’s intent is to play ever so deftly with the shifting balance of power between the initially hapless Edward (Laurence Boxhall) and the caustic Patricia (Toni Scanlon), and director Shaun Rennie has certainly cast actors who make these power-shifts credible.

Scanlon, whom we see too seldom on our stages, ostensibly has the plum role of being almost murderously misanthropic. In fact, Edward’s predecessor in trying to obtain a new publishing contract from Patricia is in therapy and having flashbacks. What a gift for any actor to play someone who savours being so nasty! Perhaps intentionally, Scanlon at first seems slightly detached, but she settles in, rather like a lion which, initially disoriented by the Colosseum, spots the Christian and licks its lips. She’s expert, too, at letting her grip slip almost imperceptibly; at intermittently losing the baton.

Boxhall has the greater challenge of making us believe Edward’s fecklessness masks a shrewdness that can transmute into sufficient steel to go toe to toe with Patricia; to be able to say, “the whole point of being American is to have the temerity to recast ourselves as who we want to be”. His success in this is absolute.

Designer Veronique Benett ingeniously squeezes a two-storey chalet with Alpine views into the Ensemble, and Rennie manipulates his actors with a keen sense of magnifying tension through proximity.

Had Murray-Smith resolved her play on the terms established in the first two acts it would be truly masterful. I shan’t tell what she does instead, but she changes those terms in a way that feels too contrived – something that wouldn’t happen in a Highsmith plot.

THEATRE
Nayika A Dancing Girl
Belvoir St Theatre, April 30
Until May 19
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN

★★★★

Belvoir St Theatre’s Nayika A Dancing Girl is that rare thing: a truly multidisciplinary performance where the edges between music, dance, and theatre meld in service of storytelling. Created by Nithya Nagarajan and Liv Satchell, Nayika is a bittersweet coming-of-age memoir, told through the flashbacks of a Sydney woman remembering her teenage years as a Chennai dancing girl.

The set is a glowing, warmly lit stage (Keerthi Subramanyam and Morgan Moroney’s design) where two musicians (Marco Cher-Gibard and Bhairavi Raman) perform from a raised platform, partly-shielded by a woven screen reminiscent of tapestry looms.

Gibard and Raman’s score is luminous, moving seamlessly from Indian classical to contemporary. At times, the music provides a sonic background, evoking Chennai’s hot coastal cityscape, and at others it dips into the narrative with melodies so poignant they almost become characters themselves.

Vaishnavi Suryaprakash carries the show as the protagonist dancing girl, in a solo performance combining technical mastery and warmth. Her performance flows effortlessly, often within the same breath.

The script draws from the storytelling techniques of Bharatanatyam dance (a form of classical Indian dance originating from South India’s Hindu temples). But Suryaprakash is so charmingly natural that I wonder if audiences unfamiliar with Bharatanatyam would make the connection – her winning sincerity lulls you into feeling you’re simply catching up with a very honest and witty friend. Suryaprakash’s characterisation is so complete that it makes a searing statement about partner violence and the ways audiences view victim identity.

Bharatanatyam also informs the story – the protagonist holds her own life against its traditions and stories, coming into her own through dance’s unique power to express both the physical and spiritual. Dance is also the lens through which she experiences empowerment and degradation.

In one of the play’s most haunting parallels, two scenes blend music, spoken word and movement, creating a dance rhythm where time seems suspended. The first recounts the ecstasy of the protagonist’s first kiss with the high school heartthrob, hidden behind a beachfront stall. The second is when the same man rapes her, again in the hidden space of his car.

This is just one example of Nayika’s masterful storytelling. With recent data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics reporting that over 1 in 5 Australian women have experienced sexual violence, its message is both important and beautifully delivered.

ISOLDE & TRISTAN
Old Fitz Theatre, May 5
Until June 1
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★

Can reparations be made for the sins of centuries? Can a love triangle be equilateral? Unsurprisingly, Argentine-German playwright Esther Vilar gives us a “no” to both questions. More remarkable is that she asks the first at all in the context of the myth of Isolde and Tristan, which has drifted through a cornucopia of entities across 600 years and many cultures.

But Vilar comes at the myth from a unique point of view. In 1971, she published a treatise called The Manipulated Man, which posited that, contrary to feminist thinking, women in western societies were actually the controllers rather than the controlled.

Her Isolde bends Tristan and King Mark the way a ship’s sails bend the wind. Nor is she motivated merely by whims of power or sexual desire: at least partly she’s serving out the British for centuries of oppression of the Irish, which wasn’t quite true at the time the myth is set, but Damien Ryan’s enthralling production is temporally fluid, anyway.

Vilar’s play (translated by Udo Borgert and Laura Ginters) does not just draw on Wagner’s opera as a primary source, it incorporates snippets of the music and libretto in a way that makes your aesthetic antennae twitch a little. Where Wagner made timeless art by brilliantly using unresolved harmonies to create ambiguities in the grand sweep of tragedy and high romance, Vilar inserts his music almost as a shock tactic in its contrast with her earthy and even racy text.

This Isolde is a peach of a role, and Emma Wright grabs her by her Irish accent and revels in the dichotomy between the minx-like seductress and the manipulative shot-caller. Playing a woman who intellectually outstrips the men and an Irish woman who outstrips these Cornish Brits, Wright is a commanding visual and vocal presence who can load a line with such withering contempt that you almost feel sorry for Tristan and King Mark.

Almost. Tom Wilson plays the rather dim Tristan: a good man if you need your boat sailed through a storm, or if you want someone decapitated. While Wilson is neither as convincing nor as engrossing as Wright, Vilar doesn’t give him anything like the same riches with which to play, and this is an inherent flaw in the work.

It comes into sharper focus when King Mark finally makes his entry (completing a cast of just three), and the evergreen Sean O’Shea imbues Mark with such charm as makes the switch in Isolde’s affections credible, even were she not cunningly wrangling them both.

Mark ultimately chooses to forgive the young couple their sexual indiscretions, but Isolde couldn’t give a fig for his forgiveness, his lopsided idea of “peace” or anything else, beyond some sexual pleasure to pass the time on board, rather like the behaviour on your modern cruise ship. (Irish whiskey, meanwhile, has become the famed love potion, as it has been for millions, whether on cruise ships or dry land.)

Ryan has soprano Octavia Barron Martin impaling us on excerpts from Wagner’s opera, while pianist Justin Leong supplies those ineffable musical equivocations. Tom Bannerman’s black set is a brooding impression of Tristan’s boat, and Bernadette Ryan’s costumes morph from medievalism to something nearer modernity, as if passing comment on the inherent timelessness.

This is Ryan’s Sport for Jove company’s first foray into the Old Fitz, and it has brought a show that sustains the theatre’s reputation for surprises. Go and relish an Isolde whose hand is firmly on the tiller.

Études / Circle Electric
Sydney Opera House, May 3
Until May 18
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★½

The best way to describe Stephanie Lake’s Circle Electric for the Australian Ballet is through analogies.

It feels like a banal hour of channel surfing. You watch a series of dissatisfying, self-indulgent scenes unrelated to those you’ve just watched and will watch after. There is little cohesive meaning or comprehensible structure between them. The only difference is that when channel surfing, you can leave the room.

The score (Robin Fox) sounds like a combination of dental tools, a flight path, a poor Philip Glass imitation, and my neighbour’s techno music leaking through our shared apartment wall. After an hour, I remember that novelist C. S. Lewis wrote that in heaven there are only melodies and silence, whereas hell is all noise.

As for the choreography, it seems to fall in that category of modern art that is unrelatable and confuses shock-jock tactics for actual meaning. You sit there trying your best to like it, remembering you paid a lot of money for tickets, and artistic types say this ballet is bold and cutting-edge. You decide you’re probably just not artistic enough to understand it.

You desperately come up with reasons to like it, not realising that by doing this you’re being as open and creative as a choreographer yourself. I’m here to shake you by the shoulders and say: it’s not you, you are not the problem.

I like to watch premieres with a generous, positive outlook. Young choreographers deserve our support for persevering with their talent and gifting us their art. The set, costumes, and lighting (Paula Levis, Charles Davis, and Bosco Shaw) are gorgeous. The dancers are fabulous, although – and perhaps this was the lighting – seem unusually thin this season. Circle Electric drops crumbs of good visions, but ultimately it’s impossible to defend the indefensible. If you want good modern dance by young female choreographers, there are other works that can speak to your humanity and challenge, uplift, or edify you.

The cortisol spike caused by Circle Electric meant it took me twenty minutes to settle into Harald Lander’s Études, a tutu ballet whimsically celebrating classicism, ballet traditions and the ritual of ballet class. The leads – Ako Kondo, Chengwu Guo, and Joseph Caley with Jarryd Madden – demonstrate grace and technical flair.

For programs with multiple dances, I calculate my star rating using an average of what I’d give each. Études has four stars. You do the math.

Guy Montgomery: 50,000,000 Guy Fans Can’t Be Wrong
Enmore Theatre, May 3
Also May 5
★★★★

Kiwi comic and Taskmaster New Zealand star Guy Montgomery is playing the biggest show of his life at a packed Enmore Theatre, having gigged at the relatively tiny Comedy Store last Sydney Comedy Festival.

But not only is his audience expanding exponentially, it’s also constantly one step ahead of him.

His ambling stories are often steeped in layers of irony, positioning himself as the oblivious dolt and eliciting rolling laughs from the gap between the boastful version of events he presents and our understanding of what happened.

It’s a thin line to walk, but Montgomery pulls it off more often than not, like when he discusses attending a wedding where the rest of his table were lesbian couples whom he lectured about the importance of two-way communication.

Another cracking bit has him deploring the stupidity of having to declare whether he has tuberculosis on his customs form. He’s so busy expressing his disbelief at having to confirm he’s free of the old-timey ailment that he doesn’t notice he’s become fatigued and is coughing up blood.

Elsewhere, Montgomery approaches his subjects with the incredulity of a freshly landed alien. He describes food delivery as some unfathomable miracle and finds positively bizarre angles on mundane topics such as Greenwich Mean Time and sports fandom.

Now 35 and apparently old enough to get online heckles for his thinning hair, Montgomery still has a boyish energy; he’s willing to earnestly interrogate something as ingrained in society as national flags, to find absurdity in the familiar.

With his slightly dishevelled look and stoner drawl, Montgomery can seem like he’s just wandered on stage with little ambition beyond sharing some off-the-cuff observations. But there’s precision and craft behind the laughs. It takes a clever comic to play the buffoon this well.