Now this is how you put on a production of Hamlet
By Cameron Woodhead, Kate Jones, Tony Way and Michael Dwyer
THEATRE
Hamlet ★★★★
Melbourne Shakespeare Company, fortyfivedownstairs, until September 22
Any company looking to perform Hamlet should look no further than Melbourne’s indie theatre scene. This is how it’s done.
A cast of well-known actors performing for beer money has been assembled for director Iain Sinclair’s production of Hamlet.Credit: Ben Andrews
Director Iain Sinclair has assembled an absolute dream team – a large cast of well-known actors you’ll recognise from stage and screen, all performing for beer money. It’s the kind of gift to audiences that you only get when an annihilating passion for the art of acting meets a theatre culture at its communitarian best.
Interestingly, the most striking recent portrayals of Hamlet have come from female-identifying performers – Harriet Gordon-Anderson as the Dane in a Bell Shakespeare production, and Kate Mulvany as Sarah Bernhardt playing Hamlet last year at the MTC.
Gender reveals itself starkly in this outing, too.
Jacob Collins-Levy gives a daringly unlikeable interpretation. This is Hamlet as tortured victim of patriarchy – a privately educated boy, clever, conventionally handsome, whose self-loathing exceeds his self-awareness.
Aisha Aidara as Hamlet’s crush Ophelia.Credit: Ben Andrews
He’s a Hamlet of “wild and whirling words” who finds corruption everywhere, knowing – without knowing he knows – that what has been murdered and usurped, and what must be avenged, is male entitlement, an unearned power he can’t quite recognise or control in himself.
No wonder he’s so ambivalent; no wonder his misogyny surfaces with such intensity under stress.
Hamlet’s crush on Ophelia (Aisha Aidara) is given awfully short shrift – the fondness between her and her brother Laertes (Laurence Boxhall) feels deeper and more genuine – and the encounters with Gertrude (Meredith Penman, covering for an injured Natasha Herbert at the performance I attended) are where Hamlet loses it for real.
There’s menace and pathos in a Hamlet who feels his privilege evacuated by experience. The ghost of a cruel smile passes his lips as he taunts Polonius (Darren Gilshenan) – whose own paternal anxiety has such an affable patina of dad humour that it deepens the tragedy – or plays deadly games with Rosencrantz (Emmanuelle Mattana) and Guildenstern (Orion Carey-Clark).
Darren Gilshenan as Polonius.Credit: Ben Andrews
Peter Houghton’s Claudius convinces as the smiling villain, proving himself as able in meaty dramatic roles as comedic ones. Unsurprisingly, for a troupe of such accomplished and intelligent actors, the play-within-a-play impresses itself indelibly in the mind.
There are other formidable actors not mentioned here. Across the board, the command of verse is watertight, the interpretation sophisticated and the play unfurls without a dead moment.
Performed in the round, with elegant minimalist design and costume creating an ambience that feels at once contemporary and timeless, it’s an invigorating production that would honour the program of any mainstage company or arts festival in the land. Shakespeare lovers should grab themselves a ticket before the scalpers descend.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
MUSIC
Tones and I ★★★★
Margaret Court Arena, September 7
Toni Watson, aka Tones and I, made it clear to a sold-out Melbourne crowd: she can’t quite believe she’s here.
Tones and I performing at Margaret Court Arena on Saturday.Credit: Richard Clifford
“I used to work in retail at Universal, Southland,” she said.
“I just played music on the street and all of a sudden, my music went so quickly. Then I got asked if I wanted to go on tour with Pink.”
This rapid ascent from busker to music stardom has happened in just five years and Tones and I is still taking it in.
In that time, the singer-songwriter has released a series of hits that captivated a cross-section of fans. While the audience is largely female, there’s a fair number of men and a decent number of parents with kids in tow.
Tones and I returns to home turf with a sold-out Melbourne gig.Credit: Richard Clifford
When the chorus of Dance Monkey – the track that catapulted Tones and I into the limelight in 2019 – begins, the bulk of the crowd is up on their feet, heads bouncing.
She may be most widely known for this earworm, but Tones and I is no one-trick pony.
She opens with Figure it Out, from her newly released album Beautifully Ordinary, before jumping into the joyous Cloudy Day.
Surrounded by her 10-strong choir, plus four dancers and four band members, Tones and I throws everything she has at a full stage spectacular.
The lights, the background animation, the confetti cannons, the costume changes, the fireworks. It leaves you with the impression she picked up a thing or two from Pink.
But this hometown show was more personal. When Tones and I waves at her nana, who later appears on stage for a dance, and sings Sorrento about her late grandfather, it’s a real family moment.
Reviewed by Kate Jones
MUSIC
Tognetti. Mendelssohn. Bach. ★★★★
Australian Chamber Orchestra, Melbourne Recital Centre, September 7
Nordic and Australian modern thoughtfully contrasted two beloved classics in the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s second last national tour for the year. Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor and Mendelssohn’s Octet were chosen to showcase the skills of the ACO’s longstanding lead violin Richard Tognetti, while works by Einojuhani Rautavaara, Jakub Jankowski and Anna Thorvaldsdottir represented the orchestra’s ongoing edgy engagement with music of the present day.
Musicians of the Australian Chamber Orchestra at an earlier performance.Credit: ACO
Tognetti maintained plenty of vigour throughout, despite appearing to have suffered an injury to his left foot, which moderated his usual physicality.
Vividly summoning up Finnish country life, Rautavaara’s Fiddlers opened the program in a rustic mood that was by turns feisty, playful and atmospheric.
This led perfectly to a newly commissioned work by Adelaide-based composer Jankowski. Ritornello (referring to the baroque practice of returning to a musical refrain) showed plenty of originality. Players’ bows were thrust up and down in the air to create a slight whistling noise, before a stomp and a shout from the orchestra led to periods of angst and reflection. The end came softly and suddenly, but not before specially designed wooden comb-bows had produced an eerie sound, underlining the composer’s fascination with folk and surrealist influences.
Cleansing the musical palate, Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor was buoyed by an elegant energy and Tognetti’s particularly expressive Andante. However, some fleeting moments of unfocussed intonation and co-ordination in the ensemble took the razor-sharp edge off the performance.
Icelandic composer Thorvaldsdottir’s Illumine began with some tremulous foreboding before giving way to the calmness of radiating light.
A rapturous and refined account of Mendelssohn’s Octet, the astonishing work of a precocious teenager, revealed the ACO’s true musical mettle, every player revelling in the music’s constant challenges. The bubbling, elfin scherzo led into an adrenaline-fuelled finale, ending the concert on an exultant high.
Reviewed by Tony Way
MUSIC
Iron Maiden ★★★★
Rod Laver Arena, September 6
War. Madness. Fear. Death. Genocide. Apocalypse. Iron Maiden know how to have fun.
Not for these seasoned Brits the confetti and strippers of their American cousins. In their hands, heavy metal is more history channel than porn channel: a boy’s own battle cry that defies ages. “Time is always on my side,” goes the opening song’s refrain.
Almost 50 years after the band formed, Iron Maiden bring their hellfire and fury to Rod Laver Arena.Credit: Richard Clifford
They arrive, of course, in a blaze of hellfire. The four guitarists led by shorts-wearing bassist-songwriter Steve Harris fan across the stage, visibly straining to wring their viscous metal extrusion from furiously twiddling fingers as the packed room roars from rammed mosh to rafters.
Singer Bruce Dickinson gallops in under a vagrant’s cloak: the scarred traveller bearing grave tidings. “Stranger in a strange land,” he sings in his undimmed, oscillating tenor as he gallivants left and right, summoning waves of salute from the floor.
Drummer Nicko McBrain, buried in the Blade Runner/ Mad Max staging dominated by evolving fantasy-horror animations, keeps the thunder rolling.
War. Madness. Fear. Death. Genocide. Apocalypse. Iron Maiden know how to have fun.Credit: Richard Clifford
There’s an extra frisson of survivors’ grit in the air tonight, since COVID robbed us of Maiden’s Legacy of the Beast tour in 2020.
This year’s Future Past set list has fewer classic hits – we do get Can I Play With Madness, The Trooper and Wasted Years – but the half-dozen songs from latest album Senjutsu are already crowd pleasers. Death of the Celts and Alexander the Great are epics, naturally, bookended by Stonehenge-style atmospherics as rivers of smoke cascade over battlements.
One foot usually planted on foldback monitors, accumulated lead guitarists Adrian Smith, Dave Murray and Janick Gers trade face-melting solos.
As always, the appearance of zombie mascot Eddie (actually a bloke on stilts in a suit) is more pantomime-daft than actually menacing, but his laser-gun shootout with Dickinson in Heaven Can Wait is the kind of moment the kids in attendance will tell their kids about. Apocalypse permitting.
Reviewed by Michael Dwyer
THEATRE
Mother ★★★★
Arts Centre Melbourne, until September 21
The poor and the marginalised have spurred Daniel Keene’s dramatic imagination since at least the days of the critically acclaimed Keene/Taylor Theatre Project (1997-2002), which began, famously, with short plays staged inside the Brotherhood of St Laurence furniture warehouse in Fitzroy.
Noni Hazlehurst in a scene from Mother. Credit: Brett Boardman
Written for Noni Hazlehurst, his haunting monodrama Mother returns to the poorest of the poor. It gives voice to an ageing homeless woman, Christie, as she wanders the laneways and watering-holes and liminal places of a bygone inner Melbourne.
Between Keene’s exquisitely crafted writing and Hazlehurst’s staggering performance, Mother is theatre that bores into the conscience. Unlike rough sleepers you might walk past in the street, you won’t be able to look away.
Noni Hazlehurst invests the character with the fundamental dignity of the dispossessed.Credit: Brett Boardman
The play is far from misery porn. It’s shot through with black humour that accentuates the harrowing realities of Christie’s life – blighted by grief, mental illness, addiction, and the rejection and contempt of all (her plight is seen as so fearful she attracts even the hatred of little boys).
Keene is also unabashedly a philosopher of the stage. I feel a bit silly saying there’s a negative theology to his work. The down-and-out characters he creates do often have an existential and agnostic bent, like Samuel Beckett’s, though given what Christie has to say about Jesus, she’d doubtless think a phrase as fancy as “negative theology” was the study of what an absolute bastard God can be.
Yet it’s true. Much in Christie’s life has been smothered by the stigma and humiliation of poverty, but she has learnt to snatch blessings where she can.
In one poignant scene, she washes herself in a font of holy water at a church when no one is looking, and there’s unexpected wisdom in the “next to nothing” she admits to knowing … lessons in death, in pain, in loneliness from which she can’t afford to distract herself.
Hazlehurst doesn’t just transform into an utterly convincing homeless alcoholic, she invests the character with the fundamental dignity of the dispossessed in a way that reminds you forcefully of the call to ethical action the most vulnerable inspire in every major world religion, from the practice of zakat (almsgiving) in Islam to the Beatitudes in Christianity.
Blessed are the poor, in spirit and otherwise … and if the design of this production is undistinguished, Matt Scholten’s direction gets such a mesmerising performance from Hazlehurst, such a sharp sense of our complicity in human suffering, that it scarcely matters.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it every Friday.