Wild Bore
Malthouse
This wonderfully tricky and sticky work took a dry and overwrought issue (we’ve all seen enough half thought out Facebook screeds against criticism to last a lifetime) and made something intelligent, pointed and, most of all, fun. Zoë Coombs Marr, Ursula Martinez and Adrienne Truscott laughed at themselves as much as the critics, spinning a meta-narrative questioning why any of us care so much about comedy and performance art, while also arguing that it is something worth caring about, if only it’s done right.
Several weeks after I saw the show, I had a missed call from a friend in the theatre that night. His audience had been evacuated due to a technical issue and he desperately wanted to know if it was real or if it was all part of the show. I had to tell him it hadn’t happened when I was there but that didn’t mean it wasn’t all part of the work. Months later, this nebulous line between messy reality and messy construct might be my favourite thing about the production, as I’m still sitting here trying to work it all out. – Jane Howard
The Second Woman
Nat Randall and Anna Breckon, Carriageworks
Months later and I am still thinking about The Second Woman, the extraordinary piece of endurance theatre in which writer/actor/creator Nat Randall performs the same scene 100 times with 100 different men over a 24-hour period.
The dramatic set-up is disarmingly simple: Marty arrives at Virginia’s house with take-away food and an apology. They have a drink and Virginia seeks emotional assurance from him, which he does or does not give, depending on the male actor’s interpretation of the script. The disintegration of the relationship that follows is inevitable but how it occurs and the emotional tenor of the outcome is entirely dependent on the rapport developed between the two actors in each seven-minute scene.
You can never step into the same river twice goes the cliché but the truth at the heart of this truism finds its vivid, compelling expression in The Second Woman. This is a masterclass in the nuances of live performance and, indeed, relationships; an illustration of how even the most subtle shift in tone can have enormous dramatic reverberations – even when working with precisely the same script, set, actors and conditions.
The show is inspired by and includes some dialogue from John Cassavetes’s 1977 film, Opening Night, but this is no mere recreation. With a critical eye for the political and dramatic implications of cinema and theatre conventions but weaponising them to her own ends, Randall has created a piece of art – and a blistering critique of gendered power dynamics – that is entirely her own. – Stephanie Convery
Mr Burns: A Post-Electric Play
Belvoir/State Theatre Company of South Australia
The UK playwright Anne Washburn’s play was a surprise to audiences: when it opens, a straggly group of survivors are sitting around a fire, trying to reconstruct an episode of The Simpsons from memory. That reconstruction evolves as a post-apocalyptic America puts itself back together: we see these pop culture favourites turn into titans of commerce and finally gods, the basis of a new world’s myths.
In the hands of director Imara Savage and a remarkable ensemble, with music by the late composer Michael Friedman, the play was an explosion of the intersection of high and low culture. Savage’s production was comic and lively and full of striking imagery but always also melancholic. In the third act, a defiant boy-prince Bart Simpson (Esther Hannaford) faces down nuclear villain Mr Burns (Mitchell Butel) in a sung-through passion play, both upending and reaffirming our craving for story. The moment was deeply recognisable, meta-textual and oddly moving.
But Mr Burns’ most enduring, appealing trait as a piece of theatre is that it stands as an interrogation and excavation of but also a love letter to our utterly human need to tell each other stories in the dark, to build a shared community around memory and experiences, to remix ideas into memes and tropes to help us better understand ourselves – and each other. – Cassie Tongue
Dry Land
Outhouse Theatre Co/Mad March Hare
Sandwiched between multi-level bars packed with happy hour revellers in Sydney’s nightclub district is the Kings Cross Theatre. It’s a tiny traverse playing-space hidden inside the Kings Cross Hotel and it’s the unlikely home of Sydney’s theatrical social conscience. The space, curated by Bakehouse Theatre Company, produces ambitious, contemporary, risky, sociopolitically engaged plays with mixed results.
But it struck gold with Dry Land. Written by the US playwright Ruby Rae Spiegel when she was just 21 years old, and directed here by sharp emerging talent Claudia Barrie, this unflinching look at the experience of being a young woman in a world in which her body has been legislated out of her control was confronting, graphic and strangely beautiful.
Watching Amy (Patricia Pemberton) ask gangly loner Ester (Sarah Rae Anne Meacham) to punch her so she can terminate her unwanted pregnancy was unsettling but it was also essential – a knotty portrait of solidarity, friendship and despair under patriarchy. Barrie directed the play with shrewd sensitivity and, while its climax may have made one or two audience members faint, what lingered was the visceral feeling of something having collided with your body and climbed inside. Long after it’s over, you carry this play with you. – Cassie Tongue
Angels in America: Millennium Approaches
Cameron Lukey/Dirty Pretty Theatre/fortyfivedownstairs
I ached in the dark as I watched Prior Walter (Grant Cartwright) dance a pas de deux with his absent lover, Louis Ironson (Simon Corfield). Prior, afflicted by Aids, a disease given metaphorical resonance for late 20th-century capitalism in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, is prone to delusions that conjure ghosts past and angels present. Therefore, this romantic interlude, set to the song Moon River, is a cruel fantasia, because Louis could not commit to lives lived in sickness as well as health.
I had seen several productions of Kushner’s two-part epic work, the first of which, Millennium Approaches, was awarded a Pulitzer prize. But this small-scale production, by Cameron Lukey & Dirty Pretty Theatre at fortyfivedownstairs theatre in Melbourne, showed that, even on a tight budget, the right cast – with heart, passion and a sense of Kushner’s rhythms – could convey humanity in all of its flawed and beauteous multitudes.
Helen Morse was stellar as the hardened Mormon mother, Hannah Pitt, and suitably arch as a male rabbi. Gary Abraham’s assured direction was abetted by precise lighting and sound design. I hope we see this production again. – Steve Dow
Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets
Malthouse/Victorian Opera
Any show boasting a live triptych of cabaret legends Meow Meow, Paul Capsis and Le Gateau Chocolat was always going to draw me in. Black Rider, through director Matthew Lutton, managed to harness the sum of their talents and give us more. Kanen Breen as Wilhelm, armed with a rifle, is hunting for love and given bullets by a female devil, Pegleg (Meow), who also issues him a Faustian bargain. The musical drew upon Weimar cabaret, Buster Keaton and his vaudeville antecedents, and the spookily gothic.
The staging was suitably bonkers, a puppet show of trophy heads and trap-doors, living up to the tale, drawn from an old German fable, by the musician Tom Waits and the writer William S Burroughs. The live music ensemble was built around a refurbished 19th century organ, contrabassoon, bass clarinet, bass trombone, tubs, upright bass and cello, accompanied by musical saw, toy piano and found-object percussion instruments. While the instrumentation was lower register, the music, mise en scène and comedy added up to mad art. – Steve Dow
Muriel’s Wedding: The Musical
Sydney Theatre Company/Global Creatures
Abba, literally, takes centre stage in this brash, gutsy adaptation of PJ Hogan’s 1994 movie, which sees the immortal phrase “You’re terrible, Muriel” come to the stage. A first-rate all-singing, all-dancing cast delivers the story of Muriel’s quest to escape the suffocating small town of Porpoise Spit and to get married, with the action updated to the social media obsessed youth of today.
There are plenty of old Abba favourites to get you tapping along and some witty new tunes written by Aussie duo Keir Nuttall and Kate Miller-Heidke. Yes, the darker side of the film tends to get lost and a happy-ever-after ending negates the feminist credentials of the original. But Muriel’s Wedding: The Musical is nonetheless an often laugh-out-loud send-up of all things Australiana and, above all, lashings of high-spirited fun. – Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore
Chimerica
Sydney Theatre Company
The British playwright Lucy Kirkwood’s award-winning West End hit had its Australian premiere in March with Kip Williams, in his debut as Sydney Theatre Company’s artistic director, taking the helm. And it didn’t disappoint. Central to the play is a quest to find the identity of “Tank Man”, the lone protester who, during the bloody 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, held up a single hand to stop the tanks.
Swinging between flashbacks to the student uprising and modern day Beijing and New York, we see the event through two people’s eyes: the photojournalist Joe Schofield and survivor Zhang Lin. Chimerica has now travelled the world but Williams, to his credit, makes the play his own using people power – and a vast cast of 32 – to give full force to action that is often cinematic in scope. Chimerica is not only brilliant writing, it is a hard-hitting look the complex, compromised relationship between two great superpowers, America and China. For that reason it remains as relevant today as when it first ran in 2013. – Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore
Siren Song
Byron J Scullin/Supple Fox
On first listen, at dusk down at Salamanca Place, Hobart, it sounded like a call to prayer. Glance up to the sky and the sound, coming from 450 speakers placed strategically around the Hobart CBD, was accompanied by a helicopter flying low across the water. The helicopter, flown by the late Roger Corbin, had speakers attached to its base and, twice a day, at dawn and dusk, it flew across Hobart’s skies marking the changing of the light with mournful and strange music.
This was Siren Song – a piece of aural art by Melbourne sound artist Byron J Scullin and curatorial team Supple Fox (Hannah Fox and Tom Supple) – created for this year’s excellent Dark Mofo festival. It was a piece of public art that stopped people in their tracks as they were walking through the city or along the waterfront. Unexpected and beautiful, it was also testament to what can happen when a city backs artists and allows the work to extend beyond the boundaries of a theatre. – Brigid Delaney
Hir
Belvoir
About 10 minutes into Belvoir St’s opening night performance of Taylor Mac’s Hir, the man sitting next to me spread his legs and arms, inch by inch insinuating himself right up in my space. I crunched my body up tighter and smaller to avoid skin contact: for women at the theatre, in cinemas, on public transport, this tends to be just par for the course.
The man was about the same age and build as Arnie (Greg Stone), the play’s abusive family patriarch who gets quite literally stripped of his masculinity after a stroke. His long-suffering wife, Paige (Helen Thomson) – newly “woke” and guided by a brutal, magnificent fury – feeds him oestrogen and puts him in a dress and make-up. Meanwhile, their child Maxine (Kurt Pimblett) injects testosterone to transition to Max, perplexing Max’s brother Isaac, who has just come back from the war.
Directed by Anthea Williams, and with a stellar cast led by the heartbreaking Thomson, the play is hysterical, fast-paced and endlessly clever as it lampoons almost everything in its path. In particular, it deconstructs and ridicules the entitlement that carries men of a certain age through life. It was metaphorical wish-fulfilment for anyone who had been enraged by gender dynamics in 2017 – and by the time we’d come back from interval, the chap next to me had sheepishly shrunk three sizes and I could stretch out in my seat. – Steph Harmon
