By John Shand, Cassie Tongue and Peter McCallum
THEATRE
Foam
The Substation, Qtopia
August 7
Reviewed by CASSIE TONGUE
★★★
The Substation at Qtopia, Sydney’s LGBTQ Museum in Darlinghurst, might be the perfect location for UK playwright Harry McDonald’s Foam: its subterranean gloominess makes for a seamless transformation into a series of public toilets, where this play is set.
The play is a series of fictionalised snapshots telling the story of Nicky Crane (Patrick Phillips), a very real British Neo-Nazi who committed multiple violent attacks on black citizens, led an attack at an anti-racist concert and played active roles in neo-Nazi organisations.
Patrick Phillips and Timothy Springs in Foam.Credit: Robert Catto
Crane, with his skinhead style and ties to the punk music scene, is a fascinating or especially complex figure to some because he was also gay: he worked as a bouncer for gay clubs, marched in pride marches and had a stint in gay adult entertainment. He died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1993.
Foam is preoccupied with this complexity, staging a series of conversations and encounters in bathrooms between Crane (first at 15) and a series of others: an older man who encourages Nicky to join the movement (Chad Traupmann); a party photographer (Joshua Merten); a figure from his past (Timothy Springs, AKA Drag Race Down Under’s Hollywould Star).
Each cast member, except Phillips, doubles roles in a round-robin of lovers, acquaintances and victims. A scene could end with a kiss or a fist, but the conversations are all the same: each new character tries to tease out how committed Crane is to his extreme views or whether he just likes the aesthetic, and if he’s really a neo-Nazi, how can that be true if he’s also gay?
There are few insights here into Crane’s compartmentalisation of his identities, or into how conflicting beliefs interact, so despite the troublingly relevant subject matter, the play feels more superficial than urgent. The writing is circular and repetitive – arguments and exchanges quickly become predictable – and the play is more a presentation of complicated ideas than an interrogation of them.
Director Gavin Roach leans heavily on the intimacy of the small space to create tension in each scene, playing up the claustrophobic nature of the Substation. The audience and cast enters and exits the theatre via a single set of stairs; just like the characters, we’re trapped in here with a Nazi. Akesiu Poitaha’s sound design is key here: it thrums with low drones of danger, distorted club beats, and the distant noise of crowds.
The performances are uneven, and scenic transitions occasionally lag. Phillips does his best with the material, which keeps us at arm’s length from the defensive, closed-off Crane. Merten’s characters are standouts, getting closer to the emotional depth and truth of the scenes, which does elevate the material. He had audience members around me leaning forward in their seats.
The play is not easy to watch, but it doesn’t dig deep enough to linger. At a time of rising far-right ideologies in Australia and beyond, it’s hard not to feel disappointed by a play that feels so surprised by its own subject.
MUSIC
Lyrical Woodwinds in the City
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
City Recital Hall, August 7
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★
This was a program that should have been performed outdoors on a summer evening, but, as the opening of Richard Strauss’s Serenade for 13 wind instruments, Op. 7 (1881) demonstrated, the City Recital Hall’s clarity of sound served the piquancy and warmth of the wind instruments tellingly.
The first phrase was an elegantly turned Mozartian melody on oboe (Shefali Pryor) with discreet support from clarinets and bassoons. But as if sensing instinctively that this Arcadian leanness was not going to satisfy more jaded late 19th-century palettes, the 17-year-old Richard Strauss introduced subtle extra warmth and thickness in the next phrase, adding four horns, contrabassoon and then a pair of flutes.
The acoustics of the City Recital Hall suited perfectly the SSO woodwinds.Credit: Cassandra Hannagan
When the second theme appears later on clarinets and horns, the SSO players maintained transparency amid a more animated texture and busier brushstrokes. The darker colours of the development hinted at a storm that never arrives. This is an early example of Strauss’s fondness for evoking the 18th century with richer 19th-century flavours added in, and he was to repeat the exercise several times in his long career, always with a mixture of affection and make-believe, as though he wished he lived in a simpler age.
The next work, Strauss’s Suite in B flat, Op. 4 (1884) introduced some of the more characteristically Straussian heroics that were to become a feature of his orchestral music. The ensemble played the lively gavotte with excellent rhythmic precision and moved from mournful chords at the opening of the finale to a fugue with a teasing game of metric ambiguity.
Dvorak’s Serenade in D minor, Op. 44 (1878) added a cello and double bass to the texture, and the solemnity of the march with which it opens is in strong contrast to the gentle glow of its central movements. In the third movement (andante con moto), clarinettist Olli Leppaniemi opened out the first phrase with expansive expressiveness as though sketching a woodland scene, and the exchanges between him and Pryor on oboe, with velvety horn tones in the mix, contained some of the program’s most evocative moments.
The substantial ensemble in all these works is a little too large for chamber music programs and a little too small for orchestral ones and, as well as capturing Romantic nostalgia for classical form and balance, the concert showcased excellent close listening and ensemble skills from the SSO players.
MUSIC
Ronan Apcar with Ensemble Apex
ACO On The Pier, August 9
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★
Born in the same year as Benjamin Britten (and also Australian Raymond Hanson), Dulcie Holland’s music was well known and widely played in the lounge rooms of young music students but struggled to be heard in the places where it supposedly mattered – major concert halls.
Her music is bright, inventive and shows high craft, and her harmonic language is salted with discreet dissonance but never over-spiced or atonal. After World War II, her genteel style was overlooked, partly because of the shift to avant-garde modernism and partly because she was a woman.
Ronan Apcar’s playing showing facility, sincerity and convictionCredit: Angus McKee
In recent years, several have sought to remedy this. In this program with Ensemble Apex under conductor Sam Weller, Canberra-based pianist Ronan Apcar presented three unpublished works spanning three decades, alongside music by Daniel Rojas and Nigel Westlake.
Holland’s Serious Procession for solo piano (1950) began with quiet spiky thoughtfulness building to a climax in a well-shaped formal arc. Daniel Rojas’s La Gran Salsa (2019 revised 2025), heard here in an arrangement for piano and string orchestra, is a homage to Piazzolla’s Le Grand Tango and draws on the brooding energy of South American rhythms.
It began quietly with a sultry piano solo, and the ensuing whistling sounds from the strings increased the steaminess of mood to a point of manic activity. It was a work of twitching, rhythmic energy that was sometimes suppressed and sometimes explosive.
Nigel Westlake’s Out of the Blue (1994) for string orchestra also built to moments of frenetic rhythmic intensity, using repetitive minimalist patterns and quirky string sounds, sometimes rasping, sometimes growling like a creaking door. It posed challenges for Ensemble Apex but Weller chiselled out its demanding rhythmic complexity with confidence and clarity. Holland’s Conversation for Piano (1954) was in two contrasting movements which each intruded on the other, Reflective (impressionistic and supple) and Emphatic (rhythmically defined though never overbearing).
The program concluded with a major work of Holland’s – her Concertino for Piano and Strings (1983), unperformed until Apcar and conductor Leonard Weiss edited it from the manuscript in the National Library of Australia and presented it in 2022.
The concise first movement was built on a short motive that seemed to be constantly urging the music to cheerful exuberance. The finale combined virtuosic toccata-style pianistic figuration with skipping energy from the strings.
Between these came the expressive centre of the work – a slow movement with tolling bell-like sounds and sorrowful cello melody (Rachel Siu). Each movement featured expansive piano cadenzas with Apcar’s playing showing facility, sincerity and conviction.
THEATRE
MACBETH
The Lounge, Chatswood Concourse, August 5
Until August 9
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★
Macbeth must gnaw at your vitals with ever-increasing ferocity, just as the titular character’s desperation to escape his predicament gnaws at his own. It should be impossible to sit there passively: you should feel the spell ensnaring you, feel the blackness swelling.
This production touches that abyss: intermittently at first – in a rush in the Act III banquet scene, when Macbeth (Charles Mayer) sees Banquo’s ghost. Then we feel Macbeth’s inner terror, as Mayer’s characterisation – sometimes too detached – suddenly congeals. Now we understand that, while Macbeth may have been an efficient killing machine as a soldier, murder lay beyond his bounds until one kept demanding another and another.
Charles Mayer and Jo Bloom as the royal couple.Credit: Syl Marie
The banquet works all the more effectively because we audience members are made to be the other guests. This stripped-down production has a cast of only six, where Shakespeare’s original 30-odd characters might conventionally be played by a dozen or more actors. Because Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (Jo Bloom) address us as their guests, we’re drawn into the scene and consequently deeper into the terrors beating in the King’s heart.
The production is presented by Chatswood Concourse’s new resident theatre company, Come you Spirits, and is collectively directed, reflecting the company’s ethos. Not only is the cast pared back – the show has a running time of only 90 minutes (plus interval). So even if it took until the banquet scene to fully pull us in, it hadn’t taken long to get there.
Having proved he could grip us by the throat, Mayer could not quite sustain that intensity. Macbeth’s final soliloquy, which comes when he’s been told his wife is dead, and which, containing “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage…” is one of Shakespeare’s greatest speeches, slid by without impaling us. It was too rushed, but, more than that, for us to be appalled, Macbeth’s very bowels must be appalled, and that we didn’t feel.
Bloom was convincing as both the lover and the spur of her husband, and slipped deeper into Lady Macbeth as the play progressed. As with her colleagues, she was fighting a creeping sense of melodrama, exacerbated by Brandon Read’s busy score. The music helped set the eerie mood and tone, but could have been expunged more often beneath the voices.
Letitia Hodgkinson’s effective set and costumes gave us the rare pleasure of having the play restored to its period setting. An oddity was having such a long runway extending from the stage into the audience, as this left most of the action more remote from us than if the stage itself came further forward.
Among a cast completed by David Halgren, Ciaran O’Riordan and dancer Ella Havelka, Willa King stood out as the First Witch, possessing such a commanding voice as could have made me, too, believe that I was fated to be Scottish king.
MUSICAL THEATRE
ONCE ON THIS ISLAND
Hayes Theatre, August 6
Until August 31
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★
I don’t recall attending another show at the Hayes Theatre where the best part was strolling past the El Alamein Fountain. That Once on This Island won an Olivier Award (best new musical) and a Tony Award (best revival of a musical) beggars belief. Even were those productions of a higher standard than this Curveball Creative one, the show itself is irretrievably flawed.
Because it’s set in the Caribbean (being based on the novel My Love, My Love, or, The Peasant Girl by Rosa Guy, which, in turn, was based on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid), composer Stephen Flaherty has drawn on that region’s musical vibrancy. So far, so good. But then he’s overlaid those rhythms and textures with some truly loathsome vocal melodies and added hackneyed key changes at every turn.
The ensemble in Once On This Island.Credit: David Hooley
The cause is not aided by Lynn Ahrens’ book and lyrics, which combine lame rhymes with such slushy sentimentality as leaves one gasping for air. Often it’s like watching a cross between a crass soap opera and excerpts from a Caribbean Spinal Tap.
Seldom do vocal melodies force vocalists to sing this badly. Nothing wears the ears like screeching, and this was akin to dusk in Katoomba, when the sky turns white with sulphur-crested cockatoos shrieking their excitement at going off to roost.
In fairness, the show duly received a standing ovation with the obligatory whooping. But then try attending a Sydney opening night where that doesn’t happen. They’re engineered. The only genuine standing ovation I’ve experienced recently was for Grief Is the Thing with Feathers at Belvoir – and that’s theatre of a monumentally different order.
Let’s talk about the positives. Thalia Osegueda Santos, who plays Ti Moune, the teen who falls for the wrong boy (obviously having failed to read The Little Mermaid), can dance with abandon and shows flashes of star power. However, she needs to craft high notes that aren’t aural daggers.
Zahra Andrews gives the standout performance as Mama Euralie, who adopts Ti Moune. She has a warmth of voice and ease of acting that are conspicuous on a stage where falseness is the norm. This stiltedness can occasionally work in Brittanie Shipway’s production, when there’s a story within the story, for instance. But the performers are caught in a pickle because the characters, including Daniel, Ti Moune’s love interest (Alexander Tye), have no more substance than the songs. How do you play a cipher?
There are a few striking scenes, as when the gods (Googoorewon Knox, Paula Parore, Rebecca Verrier and Cypriana Singh) laugh at Ti Moune’s prayer to them, when Daniel’s backstory is told in silhouette upon a screen, and when the journeying Ti Moune discovers birds, trees and frogs. Then Shipway’s staging is a delight. But ultimately, it’s putting lipstick on a mortally wounded body.
MUSIC
THE ROYAL ORGANIST
James O’Donnell
Opera House, July 30
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★½
Perched high in the organ loft, with video relay of his digital dexterity over the console’s five keyboards displayed on a large screen below, royal organist James O’Donnell gave a magnificent display of the variety that can be conjured from the 10,244 pipes of the Ronald Sharp-designed grand organ, majestically positioned on the south wall of the Opera House concert hall.
The instrument is neo-baroque in conception but, as O’Donnell demonstrated, can be equally harnessed to the demands of the French and English Romantic traditions as well as to more delicate Impressionist styles.
In O’Donnell’s hands, its virtues were clarity across all six divisions both in combination and individually, a judicious mix of warmth and stridency, multiple shades of colour, piquancy and wispiness, and, of course, thrilling power when the full organ is opened up.
In the Prelude and Fugue in E-flat, BWV 552 that frames Part 3 of Bach’s Clavierubung (“Keyboard practice”), O’Donnell selected stops that contrasted the full organ sound with quieter episodes, moving phrases agilely between divisions to convey the work’s structure and the impression of contrasting instrumental groups. The exhilarating complexity of the fugue combined transparency and richness.
By contrast, Judith Bingham’s St Bride, assisted by angels exploited wispy flute sounds, distant trumpets and warm human-like tones. Cesar Franck’s Choral No. 1 in E was written for the sort of instrument designed by 19th century French organ-builder Cavaille-Coll, against whose excesses the neo-baroque movement was a reaction.
Yet O’Donnell adapted Sharp’s instrument to its demands for quasi-symphonic richness with imagination and discernment, while also maintaining welcome clarity which some of the larger cathedral-based French instruments struggle to attain.
William Walton’s Crown Imperial maintained the edges to its swashbuckling rhythmic swagger despite the lashings of tonal richness laid on like dumplings and gravy. O’Donnell exploited quieter voice-like stops in the middle section and gave a cameo role to the organ’s cornet and trumpet sounds from the fifth keyboard (the Kronwerk division).
In terms of exploring shaded subtlety, the most rewarding work was Durufle’s Suite, Opus 5. Its first movement created rising tension with penetrating held notes, astringent melodies and spidery fleetness while the second moved from gentle rocking sounds into a world rippling evanescence and soft pastels. The final toccata maintained keen rhythmic definition through virtuosic passages of metric irregularity. As an encore, O’Donnell played Louis Vierne’s Carillon de Wesminster, an aptly Anglo-French nod to his decades at Westminster Cathedral and Westminster Abbey.