Two powerful performances in this Streetcar make it a bare-knuckle fight
By Cameron Woodhead and Barney Zwartz
THEATRE
A Streetcar Named Desire ★★★★
By Tennessee Williams, Melboune Theatre Company, until August 17
In her Streetcar program note, director Anne-Louise Sarks portrays Blanche DuBois not simply as a victim or a woman on the verge of madness, but as heroic – a survivor resisting cruelties inflicted upon her. That is true as far as it goes. To my mind, however, one of the things that makes Blanche such an immortal role is the fact that Tennessee Williams – and Nikki Shiels in this production – allow the opposite to be true simultaneously.
Nikki Shiels as Blanche DuBois.Credit: Pia Johnson
Blanche is many things, sex criminal among them. No one paying attention to contemporary discourse around consent could fail to notice that – as an English teacher who seduces adolescent boys in her care – Blanche is a perpetrator. Today, she’d be put on the sex offenders register for life.
Why is that never mentioned in program notes? Gender, certainly, but perhaps too, because heroism and villainy are always relative. Compared to Stanley Kowalski, Blanche is heroic: not due to her crime being lesser, but because she comes closer than Stanley to self-knowledge, without fully admitting her own cruelty.
“Deliberate cruelty is not forgivable,” she says. “It is the most unforgivable thing in my opinion, and the one thing of which I have never, ever been guilty.”
Not so. Blanche’s cruel homophobic outburst killed her closeted first love, and she’s never recovered from doing the patriarchy’s dirty work for it.
L-R: Nikki Shiels and Steve Mouzakis with Stephen Lopez, Mark Leonard Winter and Gareth Yuen.Credit: Pia Johnson
Nikki Shiels makes this piece of self-deception salient, largely by avoiding prefabricated flightiness or melodrama associated with the role. Her Blanche isn’t mad. She’s quite fun – witty, and as likely to self-deprecate as self-dramatise – even if her central trauma involves overcompensating for being stripped of sexual power over men, the main power patriarchy permits her.
Blanche’s obsession with beauty and kindness achieves a brittle lyricism. It comes across as a psychological defence to guilt – just as the civility of the Deep South generally was a psychological defence against (and part of an ideology designed to justify) the barbarism of the institutionalised slavery it was built upon.
That doesn’t mean her affectations aren’t sincere, though to Mark Leonard Winter’s Stanley – a paranoid incarnation of working-class machismo whose domestic violence is genuinely terrifying – Blanche’s feminine wiles will always smell of fakery.
This production remains fuelled by powerful performances from the cast, including Michelle Lim Davidson and Mark Leonard Winter.Credit: Pia Johnson
Their bare-knuckle fight over Stella (Michelle Lim Davidson) has an animal inevitability. Cruelty, through the black lightning of class and gender prejudice, strikes from both sides.
But misogyny is the major chord in this production, and it’s most desolating where least expected: the “nice guy” Mitch (Steve Mouzakis) rejecting Blanche as not “clean” enough to present to his mother; neighbour Eunice (Katherine Tonkin) shifting from female solidarity to colluding in Blanche’s tragic fate.
There are a few quibbles. The expression of anxiety should be toned down. Leave space for the audience’s imagination to complete the emotion: hyperventilating might be a feature of some panic attacks, but it’s a spell-breaker onstage. Other elements, such as the upper storey of the revolving set, aren’t well-integrated or dramatic enough to avoid looking decorative.
But this production remains fuelled by powerful performances. Shiels and Winter are ferocious, equally persuasive antagonists, and their conflict echoes through time, speaking to social fault lines that, even today, seem as urgent and intractable as ever.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
MUSICAL
Elegies: A Song Cycle ★★★★
By William Finn, fortyfivedownstairs, until July 21
Big-ticket commercial musicals dominate Melbourne’s East End theatre district. They’re easy to find. For musical theatre connoisseurs, however, there are often hidden gems on the indie scene and Elegies: A Song Cycle is one.
Much-loved actor Nadine Garner gives a masterclass in her sharp evocation of an unabashedly elitist English teacher.Credit: Ben Fon
The debut from new company Clovelly Fox, formed by artistic director Tyran Parke, offers a moving and memorable production of a song cycle written by William Finn, the Broadway composer behind Falsettos and The 25th Annual Putnam Spelling Bee.
It’s an unusually poignant and autobiographical suite of songs, guided by memory and emotion rather than narrative, layering a lament for lost friends and relations and colleagues (and even pets) with tenderness and humour, weaving intimate personal recollections and anecdotes into the collective experience of loss.
Elegies features an unusually poignant and autobiographical suite of songs.Credit: Ben Fon
The latter includes the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, approached through the eyes of an architect, and the tragic initial phase of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, accessed through memories of creative vitality and community, of friends who died of the disease before life-saving treatments became available.
Memoir-like sketches of characters and episodes drawn from life are especially vivid, in the hands of a luxurious cast who handle the material with sensitivity and a lightness of touch. They seem to relish the chance (not always available in blockbuster musicals) to flex their muscles acting through song.
Much-loved actor Nadine Garner gives a masterclass in her sharp evocation of an unabashedly elitist English teacher, facing death and finding solace in the firm knowledge that she has passed on her love of literature to students who could keep up with her.
She’s also great opposite Kerrie Anne Greenland in another literary song, Dear Reader, an antagonistic duet between a reader and a novelist satirising certain ambivalences between artist and audience.
The rest of the cast – Anton Berezin, Glenn Hill, Marty Alix – each have highlights, and Alix is particularly funny performing a joke song about the tortured devotions of doglove, but it’s the free-flowing ensemble performance that lingers.
Elegant set design, uplifting choric interludes, restrained movement that never resorts to stage business, the seamless way each performer shares the role of narrator/composer – everything seems to click under Parke’s direction.
It’s easy to imagine Elegies performed concert-style for the songs or being reduced to sentimentality in an undisciplined production. This new company delivers a fully realised theatrical experience that should gladden the hearts of more discerning musical theatre fans.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
OPERA
La Boheme ★★★★
Opera Australia touring program, Drum Theatre, July 12
Puccini’s La Boheme is one of the best-loved operas of all time, always ranking in the top five in surveys of the most performed. This is easy to understand, given its emotional power and beauty, and Opera Australia realised both emphatically at the Drum Theatre.
Puccini’s La Boheme is one of the best-loved operas of all time.Credit: Jeff Busby
La Boheme portrays the tumultuous love story of Rodolfo and Mimi, and of their fellow struggling artists in 1830s Paris. This was the opening night of OA’s touring program, which will take the production as far afield as Tennant Creek and regional centres in several states.
The production features a truncated orchestra and a small, flexible (but amusingly authentic) set, and OA has assembled a really fine group of singers, led by John Longmuir, who dominated the evening with his purity and power as Rodolfo.
Shane Lowrencev (Colline) is another OA regular, but most of the cast are emerging singers of considerable talent: Danita Weatherstone, a tender and affecting Mimi; Cathy-Di Zhang a high-powered and sultry Musetta; and Andrew Williams and Michael Lampard as Marcello and Schaunard.
Eugene Raggio as Alcindoro and Cathy-Di Zhang as Musetta.Credit: Jeff Busby
The staging has moved forward by over a century to the 1970s, apparently inspired by director Dean Bryant’s years of impecunious struggle as a drama student – without ill effect except that the candles, central props in Act I, are incoherent in the age of electricity.
Perhaps Simon Bruckard, who did a masterful job of reducing Puccini’s score to 13 musicians and conducted with great sensitivity, should have invented a few lines about a power failure.
Of course, opera as an art form demands the suspension of belief anyway – people don’t sing their way through their lives accompanied by an orchestra – but paradoxically Puccini’s genius is such that he convinces entirely.
This was my 10th Boheme: I invariably leak tears at the end, so affecting is the music, and I did again.
In each town, OA has recruited local children to take part. In Dandenong, the unbearably cute children’s chorus came from the Keerthana Music School. This production is a great advertisement as OA attracts new and far-flung audiences.
Reviewed by Barney Zwartz
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