A clown dreams of his own funeral in the latest Cirque du Soleil show

Sometimes, however, visual elements don’t frame the acrobatics as cleanly as they might – the sheer size of the chandeliers in one scene, say, arguably distracts from the skill of the aerialists.

The show is also long, especially the first half. It was created in 2005 – an advantage to newcomers seeking a classic Cirque du Soleil experience, and much less of a novelty for aficionados who’ve followed the flowering of contemporary circus worldwide over the past two decades.

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Corteo to anyone with children, or to those who want to see Cirque du Soleil for themselves.

It’s a global phenomenon for good reason, and you can’t help but be entertained by the preternatural circus skills and high production values on display. To those who know circus well, on the other hand, the show feels a bit like a golden oldie already.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE
Destiny ★★★★
Melbourne Theatre Company, Southbank Theatre, until September 13

The year is 1976. An apartheid-era South Africa is on the precipice of the Soweto Uprising – mass protests against the imposition of the Afrikaans language on Black schoolchildren which ignited a flashpoint of police brutality.

Under Zindzi Okenyo’s direction, Kirsty Marillier’s playscript plunges us headfirst into a “coloured” household – a term assigned to people of mixed-race descent under apartheid – in the coastal South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, where Marillier was born.

Marillier, the beating heart of the play, plays Della, a forthright and overprotective young woman who keeps the household running and dotes on her flamboyant 16-year-old brother, Rocky (Gaz Dutlow), in the absence of their mother. Their father, Cliff (consummate crooner Patrick Williams), is well-meaning but often misguided in his approach to parenting them, a paragon of a restrictive form of masculinity that is often at odds with his son’s.

A serendipitous encounter brings forth the suave Ezra (Barry Conrad), a former beau of Della who has been “consciontised” into a radical revolutionary. Taken with his particular brand of resistance (and his winning smile), Rocky follows in his lead, much to Della’s chagrin. The tension ratchets up in this fateful tale that has undertones of a Greek tragedy.

Often the source of levity, Dutlow expertly brings Rocky’s childlike petulance, killer dance moves and bursts of pathos to life. Marillier oscillates masterfully between physical comedy and bouts of righteous anger, while Conrad nails the sanctimonious conviction of a political firebrand. The chemistry between Marillier and Conrad is crackling; the theatre is in a state of pindrop silence witnessing their push-and-pull dynamic play out.

Furnished in pale pastels, Sophie Woodward’s set resurrects the emblems of a South African home from yesteryear – cosy and inviting as a sanctuary from external forces. Perched aloft is the general store in which Della works, which morphs into a key meeting point for the characters.

Backdropped by idyllic rolling clouds, the set has a mesmeric depth and dimension as the characters crisscross paths, seeking a sense of themselves as they seek out one another.

The inside-out perspective of the spaces – the broader world is only ever discernible from within these realms – speaks to the focus of Destiny, which portrays how collective fear, statewide suppression and the might of a totalitarian regime seep into our most personal spaces.

Destiny wholly leans into its ’70s aesthetic, most noticeably in the jaunty disco tunes that accompany scene transitions and Woodward’s incredibly fun costume design, replete with flares, afros and polyester shirts. The actors mostly master the lilting cadence of a South African accent, which coupled with slang words such as “howzit”, “braai” and “I’ll check you”, lends the play an unmistakeable verisimilitude.

Humour is a perennial salve in the face of state-orchestrated oppression – the play’s astute mix of physical and observational comedy attests to that – but the pursuit of a punchline occasionally detracts from the emotional potency of the play’s most heartbreaking moments.

Ending on a perfectly pitched note of defiance as it parses the politics of resistance – why we resist, how we should resist, for whom we resist – Destiny arrives at a particular resonant point in time as we collectively search for ways to dismantle seemingly indestructible, oppressive regimes.
Reviewed by Sonia Nair

DANCE
Amber McCartney x Shapednoise x MATRIA ★★★
Royal Exhibition Building, August 24

Choreographer Amber McCartney has a gift for transformation and defamiliarisation. Fascinated by artificiality, she augments the body’s architecture with prosthetics and masks, and a movement style pitched between the animal and the android.

It’s fitting, then, that her latest work should appear inside the MATRIA installation: a candy-coloured, polyethylene tribute to unnatural creation. This vast balloon, wedged into one of the great vaults of the Royal Exhibition Building, both does and does not resemble a living womb.

It is, all the same, pretty spectacular. Inside the bubble, designed by a Barcelona-based production team, the architecture presses through in cartoonish relief. It’s familiar art-world gimmick: repackaging a well-known landmark in festive, plasticky drag.

But McCartney makes it interesting. Slumped in black at the centre of the pink dome, she establishes a focal point – a punctum – in the expanse of pink. Even before the performance begins, she transforms the space, giving it gravity, creating both a centre and a breach.

The performance itself runs just 20 minutes. McCartney works with a costume suggesting multiple bodies that cling together, heads jerking and nodding. Her rapid, twitchy jolts snag the plastic beneath her, gathering it around her and leaving a temporary imprint of her struggles.

At first, you stare hard, trying to decipher the arrangement: what’s real and what’s prosthetic? Is there really only one dancer? The trick of the work is that even once you’ve solved that puzzle, McCartney reanimates the other figures, drawing your eye back to them, making you care for them all over again.

The dance was followed by a live set from Italian experimental sound designer Nino Pedone, performing as Shapednoise. It made for an intriguing follow-up to McCartney, but the echoing hall did it no favours. Whatever complexity lay in the sound design was largely lost in the cavernous acoustics.
Reviewed by Andrew Fuhrmann

THEATRE
The Machine Stops ★★
Briony Dunn, Theatre Works, until August 30

Given the profound social implications of artificial intelligence technology, it would be surprising if theatres didn’t unleash at least some dystopian sci-fi inspired by it on our stages. Briony Dunn’s The Machine Stops takes up the challenge, creating a brooding future in which a highly regulated survivor-society has subjugated itself to a seemingly benevolent superintelligence.

Humans appear to have fled deep underground, the surface of the planet having long since devolved into a toxic hellscape. Or has it?

In a Matrix-style trope, knowledge of reality has been shaped by the Machine’s influence and human dependence on it. Living an atomised existence in a featureless subterranean environment is normal. So is voluntary euthanasia, which the Machine provides as an option, should life get too depressing

The central figure of a mother (Mary Helen Sassman) first emerges through stylised, silent, achingly slow physical theatre. Clever lighting and sound design augment the show’s dark atmospherics, reducing the human figure into a ghost in the machine through an abstract fusion of modular lighting, subliminal humming, and serried poles arranged with eerie geometric regularity.

A surprise request from her son (Patrick Livesey) upends the mother’s pre-programmed existence, leading to a meeting halfway across the globe, and revelations of truths about their world – bleak, dangerous, liberating truths – previously obscured from view.

Dunn is presumably aiming for the kind of dystopian drama of ideas (and ethics) that Caryl Churchill mastered in plays such as Far Away or A Number, though neither the motherhood issues nor the world-building emerge with Churchill’s lightning clarity.

The parameters of Dunn’s thought experiment can seem thematically ill-defined. Her play probably needs to front-load the world-building a bit more to make the show feel less lopsided dramatically, and some stylised physical theatre suffers from the law of diminishing returns (the mother grimacing in silent agony, in particular) if too often repeated.

That said, Sassman does present the unsettling spectacle of the emotional devolution of a figure who has outsourced all meaning and connection in her life to an AI overlord. And when Livesey appears – in live performance and through video projection – the general gloom is lifted by a revolutionary spark.

Trouble is we don’t have a developed sense of the power dynamics being overthrown, or much chance to get invested in what might replace them.

The Machine Stops does embody a sobering vision of how being terminally online can deny human agency, and it glances at insidious ways AI might make us vulnerable.

It doesn’t entirely succeed at constructing a coherent ethical fable from the material, though, and I can’t help feeling that the story needs a finer examination of the fraught borderland between care and control to do so.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSICAL THEATRE
Ordinary Days ★★★
Adam Gwon, fortyfivedownstairs, until August 31

Indie musical theatre outfit Clovelly Fox came to public notice with a slick production of William Finn’s Elegies: A Song Cycle last year. An autobiographical work featuring a strong cast including Nadine Garner, that musical suite explored memories of love and loss from the composer’s home of New York City.

NYC itself has inspired more signature show tunes than anywhere in the world. They’re not all as brassy and extroverted as the song Frank Sinatra made his own, but they do tend in that direction, and it’s probably not a coincidence that the most successful “9/11 musical”, the uplifting Come from Away, is set very much out of town, in Newfoundland, Canada, among planes diverted on the day of the attacks.

Incorporating the grief and vulnerability of the post-9/11 era – and balancing it with the city’s mythic appeal – has been a challenge. As Elegies did, Adam Gwon’s Ordinary Days (2009) plays with frustrations, eccentricities, and moments of serendipitous connection in the great cosmopolitan metropolis, while gently giving the ghosts of the past their due.

The four-hander follows two New York couples. Claire (Sarah Morrison) and Jason (Bobby Fox) are moving in together after an intense courtship, though cute tiffs turn into more serious emotional conflict when Claire – still hoarding unpacked possessions she’s unwilling to let go – starts to get cold feet.

Meanwhile, Warren (Joel Granger) and Deb (Melanie Bird) are strangers who meet by chance.

Warren’s a gay artist housesitting for another artist (who’s in jail) and in a typical optimistic and open-hearted gesture, he’s been handing out flyers based on the jailed artist’s artwork to passers-by, hoping to brighten their days.

Deb is his opposite number – a neurotic, cynical, and perpetually pissed-off grad student whose personality is drawn straight from the Seinfeld playbook. The odd couple meet when Deb loses her thesis on the subway; Warren finds it and tracks her down to return it. Against all odds, they become friends.

Fox and Morrison bring understated emotional depth to the slice-of-life romance, investing these lovers and their relationship with a dynamic, smartly observed intimacy, delicate duet vocals, and a resolution that feels emotionally earned.

As the platonic comic relief, Granger and Bird get to up the Sondheim-like post-industrial comedy of manners to a major key. Both performers relish the exaggerated contrast their screwball duo represents, and Bird’s talent for frenetic, sardonic musical humour makes it easy to imagine her excelling at say, the manic bride-to-be Amy in Sondheim’s Company.

Director Tyran Parke has delivered a no-frills production, which despite a few niggling technical issues – the odd ill-blocked scene or lighting miscue – holds your attention throughout. Versatile vocals and whirling piano accompaniment highlight Gwon’s musical brilliance, and the musical opens into a hymn to friendship, and to art, as its poignant urban love story unfolds.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

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