Melbourne theatre, musical and dance reviews

Emma Matthews is one of this country’s finest operatic talents, and if you’re looking for a crash course on the range of her skill, this might be a good place to start. The Space Between is a strange hybrid work, a semi-autobiographical song cycle that plays with form and content in a way that isn’t always lucid but is consistently fascinating. It’s a prismatic, fractured mirror into Matthews’ soul, and complete confirmation of her vocal genius. What is truly revelatory about the piece, though, is the matched genius of the composer, Paul Grabowsky.Grabowsky has been such a presence in the musical life of this city that it’s easy to forget just how magnificent a composer he is. The score here is extraordinary; at once experimental and steeped in tradition, it reaches across jazz, musical theatre and classic operatic forms. It leans heavily on arioso – that musical technique that sits halfway between aria and recitative – for its effect, but can switch gear on a dime. It moves from the roiling and modernist to the jaunty and melodic in seconds, and it’s thrilling to watch the performer match the material with such confidence.The conceit is quite brilliant, even if the results don’t entirely fulfil the promise: Matthews enters playing herself on the cusp of the final note of one of her most celebrated roles, Lucia di Lammermoor. Instead of singing that note, she oscillates and then stops; she has an actual life she wants to examine before any final chords resolve, and she invite

It’s called A Doll’s House, Part 2 and in many ways it delivers precisely what it promises on the packet: this is a serious attempt to imagine what happens when, 15 years after the fact, Nora Helmer (Marta Dusseldorp) – she who severed a deeply-held bond with her audience back in 1879 by walking out on her marriage and her children – comes back. Playwright Lucas Hnath has the audacity to stage that return, and in so doing manages to build a superbly supple series of dramatic and intellectual links between Henrik Ibsen and the current zeitgeist. If there were any doubts that fusty old dramas can still reverberate through the collective consciousness, then this play scuttles them.Nora has, virtually from the moment she first appeared in that wintery Copenhagen night, come to represent a certain proto-feminist position that is both searingly convincing and deeply problematic. Hnath ingeniously mines the original play’s ambivalences around what constitute proper female behaviour, stretching them into a spiderweb of current concerns. Nora abandons her children but she does so to survive, and this play accepts her decision at face value, and then spears her on the spike of consequence. Any woman who’s ever felt damned if she did and damned if she didn’t, is sure to relate.Although this is equally true of Nora’s oft-maligned husband Torvald (Greg Stone). Having carried the burden of raising a family without a mother, Torvald is understandably reluctant to let her back in, especially

In the last moments of Nicola Gunn’s Working with Children, a woman near me leaned to her date and said, “that’s stupid”. Some people don’t get Gunn’s theatre. That’s cool; if we all agreed, going to the theatre would be very boring. But Gunn’s work is far from “stupid”. With layers of meaning that may not be clear until hours later when you’re still thinking about it, it’s as unexpected and original as it is delightfully silly and brain-hurting serious. Working with Children is described as a very worthy and timely examination of the moral complexities of working with young artists and children. Which is ideal for an artist who’s toured her work overseas and received some prestigious fellowships. It’s also especially relevant in Melbourne, which has recently seen a spate of productions for adults made with child performers. Local outfits the Rabble and Fraught Outfit have featured child performers, as have some remarkable Belgian companies visiting for Melbourne Festival. Some of these shows left me exhilarated and cheering, while others left me wondering what’s going to happen when the young artists get older and understand the stories and images they were creating. Part of seeing work made with young artists is thinking about the creative process and their wellbeing. For theatregoers who have seen these shows, there are bonus too-close-for-comfort laughs or uncomfortable silences in Working with Children. There are no children in this work. Gunn, who also wrote, dire

My Name is Jimi is coming to Melbourne Festival in October after successful seasons in Brisbane and Sydney. Here's our four-star review of this year's Sydney season: Jimi Bani might be celebrated on the Australian mainland as a TV, film and stage actor (he’s perhaps best known for his starring role in the telemovie Mabo) but his family is a rather important clan on Mabuiag Island in the Torres Strait: Jimi’s grandfather Ephraim was the Chief of Wagadagam, and moved to Canada with his wife Petharie to study linguistics at university. This was part of his own quest to ensure that the language and culture of his people and ancestors could continue. Later on, he attempted to have significant cultural items repatriated from European institutions to the Torres Strait. Although he’d built a cultural centre to house the items, his requests to have them returned were denied. Jimi’s late father Dimple, the next Chief, continued this work, and now it’s Jimi’s chance to do the same. At the start of his autobiographical show, Jimi gives the audience a quick rundown of his family tree as well as the words for each family member in language from Mabuiag Island. He asks the audience to play close attention and warns that there’ll be a test at the end. Of course, most theatre-makers want an audience to listen carefully to the stories they tell, but for Jimi that’s even more important: this piece of theatre is part of his mission to “keep the fire burning” and ensure his culture contin

What is it that draws audiences to horror movies? Why have we, across a century of cinema, consistently sought out experiences that make our skin crawl, make us jump in fright, and make it more difficult for us to get a decent night’s sleep? Are we all just masochists, or is there something more profound going on? Swedish theatre director Jakop Ahlbom has long been a fan of horror, from the more serious, classic, critically acclaimed fare to the schlocky B-grade flicks that mightn’t have won quite so many awards but hold a place close to the hearts of plenty of cinema nuts. So a few years ago he decided to see if he could create the experience of a horror film live on stage. The resulting show, called simply Horror, is a Frankenstein’s monster of sorts, stitching together tropes from all different subgenres, ranging from Poe-esque gothic horror through to zombie flicks, creature features and supernatural spooks. All of this emerges from a fairly simple story about a young woman returning to the creepy house where she grew up. She had extraordinarily stern parents and a sister who struggled under their brutal reign. Now the ghosts of the past have re-emerged – alongside a creepy bride and some inexplicable aliens – to force the young woman to confront all that happened in her childhood. This story allows Ahlbom to shock and surprise his audience with all kinds of brilliant special effects – people appear out of thin air, a woman magically levitates, a disembodied hand scut

Mamma Mia! is the jukebox musical to end all jukebox musicals. It’s one of the most commercially successful pieces of entertainment of all time, having grossed US$2 billion since its 1999 West End premiere. To put that in perspective, only three movies have ever grossed more (sorry Harry Potter, you just haven't got the pull of Benny and Björn). It spawned the 2008 Meryl Streep-led film, which earned a sweet $600 million, and a movie sequel called Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is due to be released in July. So why does the show – with an inconsequential and frequently illogical story about a young woman on the weekend of her wedding trying to learn which of three men is her father – continue to inspire people all around the world to open their wallets and head out to the theatre? It owes its success almost entirely to the ABBA music it hangs its hackneyed but gently funny narrative off. Songs like ‘Dancing Queen’, ‘Mamma Mia’ and ‘Waterloo’ are among the greatest pop songs ever written, with melodies so broadly appealing they can fill dancefloors pretty much anywhere in the world. But there’s also a serious dramatic heft to some of the ballads – ‘The Winner Takes it All’, ‘SOS’, ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ – that means even when Catherine Johnson’s book fails to successfully stitch together musical vignettes, most numbers land with some weight. But there’s something about this new Australian production, with design, choreography and direction by Australians, that feels a littl

The title is a nonsense phrase, a bit of faux-German gibberish that sounds vaguely like real words but has no inherent meaning. Of course, with a bit of contextualisation even nonsense can be encoded with meaning, and the three performers who make up the outfit post – Zoë Coombs Marr, Natalie Rose and Mish Grigor – manage to imbue the phrase with quite a bit of it; roughly translated, it comes to signify women’s work, or women’s banter, or women’s stuff. It’s a curiously satisfying title in many ways, because women’s work, banter and stuff is the show’s modus operandi as well as its subject, object and predicate.It opens with the three performers emerging from a celestial light, all swirling white gowns and flowing locks, mounted high on plinths: a vision from a Renaissance religious painting. It’s the set up for a fairly obvious joke – when the ecclesiastic music abruptly stops they start talking and there’s nothing remotely exalted about their manner or their conversation – but it also functions as a central theme; namely, the cultural expectations women have historically been saddled with and which still exert a ludicrous power. This is a show that smuggles in a heap of smart commentary when you’re busily distracted by the silliness.And there is a lot of silliness, much of it scatalogical: different kinds of poo, the need to examine one’s poo, the tendency for women to poo on babies during child birth, the rich tapestry of poo and pooing gets a good run. There’s an extende

Song for a Weary Throat is playing a short season at Arts Centre Melbourne as part of Melbourne Festival. Here's our three-star review of its original season at Theatre Works: It opens with bodies strewn about the set – a ravaged, busted space that simultaneously suggests a blasted heath, a makeshift clearing in the woods and an abandoned skate park – prostrate and unmoving. Suddenly a blinding searchlight is turned on the audience, accompanied by a shattering roar of decibels. Our eyes and ears recover for a couple of seconds of blackout and the lights slowly rise to a new configuration of bodies, grouped together and grasping for the heavens. Then the light and the roar are back, before a new configuration and another blast and another roar. It’s relentless and initially rather powerful but, like much else in this strange work, it goes on too long and loses its effectiveness.Song for a Weary Throat is a production from Rawcus, an ensemble made up of performers with and without disability that have had a long association with this city, having performed in the Melbourne Festival, at Fringe and Dance Massive. They’ve collaborated before with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Made Opera, so they have the kudos to experiment on the audience’s time. Their latest show is a fascinating hybrid of dance, theatre and music, a sophisticated blend of media that combine to produce something curious and arresting. It’s a pity that their editorial and dramaturgical scalpel isn