An Illiad, Sydney Theatre Company, Wharf Theatre, 17 Apr-21 Jun

 

"The Iliad" was written by Homer around 2,700 years ago, and tells of events during the Trojan war- of grand battles, of great heroes, of gods, fates, of violations of the natural order of things and moments of petty hatred and of grace. Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare's adaptation brings this material brilliantly alive, using a single actor and a musician to tell the tale. In Damien Ryan's production, it's stripped to the bone in an industrial-looking, apparently bare stage by Charles Davis - David Wehnam begins the show by rolling up a roller door at the back of the stage and dragging in a Mother-Courage-like wagon covered in odds and ends, before using various of those odds and ends to tell the story (including musician Helen Svoboda who accompanies on varoius instruments, largely a double-bass though not always conventionally so). 

With not much more than the words, his voice and his body, Wenham conjures the world in front of him - the production has a few effects hidden up its sleeve but they're all deployed carefully to show just the right dramatic effect, and Wenham owns the story completely, bringing strong performance energy to the evening and bringing the audience in to him - he wears natural authority like he's been around since the stories he's telling, with a style that absorbs - there's some wry mischief in some of the moments, compassion, sorow, and some quite frightening wrath (one moment with a javelin has him stabbing the stage and leaving a divot - it's the kind of thing a performer only has to pull once becuase the audience is aware this kind of energy is lying in reserve all the time). It's been a long while since Wenham has been on a Sydney Stage (he was a regular back in the 1990s in shows like the original "The Boys" and "Cosi", or in the one-two punch of Laertes in Belvoir's Hamlet and a surprisingly prominent Alonso in "The Tempest" the next year, but it's been intermittent since - he's done one of the Melbourne run of "A christmas Carol" in 2022 but his last Sydney show was Benedict Andrew's controversial "The Seagull" in 2011. The success of this current season should see him return frequently - this is a play he absolutely owns and could do for as long as he wants in as many places as he wants. While this wasn't written for Wenham (originally written for O'Hare, who toured it internationally, including runs at the Perth and Adelaide Festivals in 2014), he owns it like it was, and it feels like between himself, Ryan and Svoboda they've found surprises, direct power and stunning effectiveness in presenting one of the world's oldest stories as something urgent and vital. 

Lose to Win, Belvoir St Theatre, The Q, 2 May (and other locations from Tralragon to Brisbane until the end of June)

 

(Image by Phil Erbacher from the Old Fitz run in 2022)

Mandela Mathia's one-man show tells the story of his youth in South Sudan and the refugee experience that brought him to Australia, about how those experiences have formed him and about how his experience as a South Sudanese refugee has been problematised by reactionary forces within Australia for their own political goals. It's an engaging story which Mathia tells alongside the musician Malin Sylla who drums and plays other instruments throughout - opening the show with a drum solo of power and rhythm, it binds the show together and makes what could be a personal travelogue into a rich aural experience.

Director Jessica Arthur ensures it's a strong visual experience too, with the help of a set design by Keerthi Subramanyam and a quite stunning lighting design from Kate Baldwin. Mathia uses pieces of luggage and small props from the luggage in telling the story, opening up a story that makes him more complicated than just a simple victim of outside circumstances, but also an active part of his own personal narrative. Mathia is an engaging teller of his own story - able to bring the various figures in his story to life, and very much taking us along the way of a deeeply complicated childhood without ever playing for sympathy or making things overly traumatic. It's a very friendly show, and richly deserves to be shared far and wide. If it tours near you, I recommend catching it. 

Constellations, Free Rain Theatre, ACT Hub, 16-25 Apr

 

Photo credit: Janelle McMenamin

Nick Payne's two hander has quite the credentials - from its opening at London's Royal Court with Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins in 2012 to a Broadway run with Jake Gyllenhall and Ruth Wilson to a filmed covid version in 2021 with four different pairings, including Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker and a gender shift to pair Russell Tovey and Omari Douglas. It's a tight play exploring a relationship between two people over the course of a number of years - one a beekeeper, one a theoretical physicist - but told in short scenes which play out in variations, reflecting the physicist's belief in multiversal theory. We're also shown fairly quickly where this relationship is heading, with a brutal decline hitting the physicist in her early 40s leading to tragic loss. 

Kelly Somes production plays this in the round, on a platform with three chairs, and keeps the protagonists constantly in motion around one another, connecting and disconnecting in moments, and playing the variations quick and smooth. Lucy Goleby and James O'Connell take the challenges and joys inherent in these roles and absolutely own them - bouncing dialogue between them in skilful rallies, finding different spins on repeated lines and rich depths under the words (the way Goleby says the word "Delicious" at one point is luxuriously wonderful). The variations between their essential personas are played with split-second timing, and these are performances that work just as well whether they're directly in front of you or on the opposite side of the platform, as they cycle around and play to all four audience quadrants very effectively. 

Aidan Bavinton's lighting design does a lot of work to separate moments and locations, from tight spots to more general washes, and does it very well. Neville Pye and Kelly Somes' sound design delivers sharp blips of sound to separate moments and get us from instant-to-instant in a way that fits perfectly with the material. 

This is a polished gem of a show, with all facets shining and reflecting, and something you can delve into over 80 minutes. It's as much a journey of the heart as of the mind, and it's a demonstration of two performers locking in to a text with passion, joy and fervour. Powerful work. 

Gutenberg! The Musical!, Hayes Theatre Company, Hayes Theatre, 10 Apr-10 May

 This goofy two hander is a tribute to enthusiasm, energy and love, as two barely-knowledgable men launch into an unlikely backers audition of their very-loosely-based-on-fact musical about Johannes Gutenberg (as in, it features him inventing a printing press in a vagely middle-ages German town, beyond that, everything else is made up). Stephen Anderson and Ryan Gonzalez are a delightful pair, Anderson as the one who thinks he knows slightly more, and Gonzalez as the slightly more vulnerable one - but you take them both to your hearts immediately as they attempt to do a mega-musical with a wide cast of characters with little more than a pianist, some hats with characters names on them and some cardboard boxes. 

I must admit I was expecting this to be a lot more improv-y than it ended up being - between my previous experience with Anderson being his loose-and-ridiculous Ruth, mother of Rose in "Titanique" and exposure to youtube videos of the cameos in the Broadwan Josh Gad/Andrew Rannels run of the show - instead this is a very tight-but-looks-chaotic show, another triumph for Richard Carroll who's previous goes at the "everybody doubles a lot" aesthetic such as Pirates of Penzance has proved the fun of seeing performers stretch themselves. Gonzalez in particular reveals a fair chunk of range between the Evil Monk, the vulnerable maiden Helvetica and the shy composer Bud. The gimmick of the show means that we have a lot of material that falls just between the amateurish and the professional, but songs like "Creepy German Wood", "Might as Well Go To Hell" and the finale "We Eat Dreams" are goddamn earworms and stick in the brain afterwards quite effectively. Zara Stantos as musical director and as accompanist "Charles" holds the musical side together, and choreographer Shannon Burns comes up with clever ideas for things to do that are dancey for two guys who are not meant to be skilled dancers (never mind that Gonzalez recently choreographed "Head over Heels" and smouldered it up in Moulin Rouge before discovering his inner loveable teddy bear in this role). 

This is a delightfully silly, inventive show that plays with musical convention, bringing the audience into the shared delusion of Bud and Doug with a surprisingly warm uncynical finale to bring grins to the audience's faces. And why the hell not. 

Sistren, Griffin Presents A Green Door Theatre Company Production in association with Belvoir Street Theatre, Belvoir Downstairs, 9 Apr-3 May

 "Sistren" is an exploration of the bond between two schoolgirls - one trans, one afro-carribean. It's a hypermodern play about how the two experience and process the culture around them with a mix of private jokes and mutual protection, and about how their  two cultures bring them into conflict. Iolanthe's script is achingly contemporary and immaculately referenced down to fashion, phrases and who's been cancelled this week. There's interesting engagement with how intersectionality really works in practice and how the concerns of a trans girl and a bio girl are not entirely the same, about some of the modern contradictions of adolescence and the way social media can help people find a community as easily as it can set communities against one another. 

As performers, Iolanthe and Janet Anderson give it their all - they are engrossing, fun to be with, and relatable even when they start to get into touchier territory. Emma White's pink fluffy schoolroom of a set gives us a world that lives half-in-half-out of the two lead's heads - it's a femme-coded wonderland that you can't help but dive into. Director Ian Michael gives his cast just enough rope to know when to pull back and when to let things run riot, and it's a warm comfy time to enjoy with the pair. 

Drive your plow over the bones of the dead, Belvoir St Theatre, Upstairs Theatre, 28 Mar-10 May

 Belvoir's big adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk's novel is an epic, at over three hours with two intermissions.  It's an ambitious work - I'm not sure that all the ambitions are realised but there's a lot that this is going into - a murder mystery about an elderly Polish woman believing that the town's animals are beginning to rise up against humans, looking at small town relationships, corruptions, science, astrology and some literary allusions. 

Pamela Rabe narrates over 95% of the show and does it in fine style - it's a virtuoso performance where a lot of the big emotional effects are in the last 10-15 minutes and she nails them in a tireless performance that keeps us engaged throughout. The rest of the cast is a mixture of talented performers mostly in smallish cameos and working as an ensemble to create environments and play animals, scenery and occasionally murder victims. Eamon Flack's adaptation is a tad saggy and his direction does suggest that a couple of rehearsal improvs have stuck around into the production more than maybe they should have (there's a bit with a remote controlled car that really does feel awkwardly stretched out), but it moves across the several seasons of story with some striking visuals (with the particular assistance of lighting designer Morgan Maroney and the hardworking stage crew of Luke McGettigan as we move from winter snowdrifts through spring, summer and autumn. 

This is probably the definition of a mixed bag - I like some of the non-Rabe cast enough to wish that they had more to do than be visual scenery a lot of the time, and I'm torn between wanting a brisker version that just tells the centre of the narrative and appreciating some of the charm and meatiness of the diversions. And god knows, the theatrical canon needs more fat parts for women over 60, and this certainly does give Rabe a hell of one. But this doesn't entirely taste fully baked, even while some of the elements are strong. 

The River, Sydney Theatre Company, Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House, 8 Apr-16 Mar

 Jez Butterworth's 80 minute play is an enigmatic story of a man, some women and the cabin where he brings them to fish for sea trout during a brief season when they're spawning back up the river near his cabin. Over the course of the evening, we see romantic banter, a fish is scaled, gutted and cooked, and the connection between coaxing a fish and coaxing a partner are explored. Butterworth's writing and Margaret Thanos's direction scrape against something disconcerting about parnership but ultimately there's not quite enough here to feel like a full theatrical meal - it's a little too keen on remaining mysterious.

Miranda Otto is absolutely the marketing hook of the show so it's odd that the play itself has her in a role that doesn't require her on stage full time. This is not the first time that STC has marketed a show on a star that isn't quite as engaged as marketing suggests nor is it the is it the first time that the play has been a bit of a disappointment. It feels like there's not quite enough meat for her or for the audience to chew on here - there's some very nice design here (Anna Tregoan's set and Damien Cooper's lighting do a lot to bring in the wide stage of the drama theatre for a play that is largely duologues), and the other members of the cast (Ewan Leslie as the Man and Andrea Demetriades as the Oher Woman) are certainly solid, but in the end it's a lot of high talent on a script that doesn't feel like it's saying particularly much - yes, it gratuitously quotes Ted Hughes for a bit of literary cred, but that's not enough for this to feel quite as meaty as it should.