Charming, awkward: This pop star’s joy is infectious

THEATRE
Romeo & Julie ★★★
Written by Gary Owen, Red Stitch, until August 18

Welsh playwright Gary Owen has forged a career reimagining stage classics through the prism of social class – or underclass, to be precise. Several of his works are set in present-day Splott, an impoverished suburb of Cardiff, where the rage and self-loathing, the desperation and sheer bloody resilience of those on the lowest rung of the social ladder swell into a tragic immensity of emotion.

Owen’s monodrama Iphigenia in Splott – which you can catch at Red Stitch in a visceral revival starring Jessica Clarke next month – took ancient Greek tragedy as inspiration.

It created a gritty yet mythical retake on Euripides, centred on a young woman facing grinding poverty, housing insecurity, pregnancy and substance abuse – her future sacrificed not to Artemis, as in the original myth, but to the merciless gods of neoliberalism and austerity.

Romeo & Julie gives a Shakespearean gloss to a similar milieu, though the stronger theatrical resonance isn’t the Bard’s most famous romantic tragedy but Britain’s “kitchen sink drama” of the 1950s.

Not that this teenage Romeo (Damon Baudin) or his alcoholic mum Barb (Belinda McClory) can afford a kitchen per se. An offstage kitchenette is more likely.

It’s a claustrophobic place to raise a baby, and Barb refuses point-blank to help care for Romeo’s infant, mocking his cluelessness and trying to convince him to place the kid in foster care, as he retches at his first attempt to change a nappy.

But Romeo persists with single parenthood, and when he meets brainy high-school student Julie (Shontane Farmer) at a public library, they become class-crossed lovers.

Julie’s parents (Justin Hosking and Claudia Greenstone) are aspirational working class, rather than lumpenproletariat, and unlike anyone else in the play, Julie has a shot at social mobility. Obsessed with theoretical physics, she has the smarts and drive for a place at Cambridge.

At first, she helps Romeo to look after the baby as “community service” to burnish her university application, before falling in love and falling pregnant. Her outraged father throws her out of the house, so Julie moves in with Romeo and Barb in an act of rebellion.

As sparks of class resentment fly, a cold reality sinks in. Becoming a teen mother will cruel Julie’s chances for a better education and a better life; she faces a terrible choice between them.
The intensity of the social realism is enhanced, not broken, by performing in Australian accents. It draws attention to destructive nuances of class psychology.

McClory’s Barb, for instance, is a tornado of dysfunction, her worldview warped by the cunning, cynicism and contempt for improvement typical of a long-term addict. It’s a part reminiscent of the hard-drinking mother Helen in the best of the “kitchen sink” plays, Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, and if this taster is anything to go by, McClory would be lightning in the part.

Farmer and Baudin make touchingly sincere teen lovers, though the production’s glacial pacing, especially in the second half, stretches their agonies on the rack of time for much too long. (Part of this is a technical issue: the set is narrowed and widened between scenes to illustrate class difference in domestic spaces.)

Still, the sharpest emotional impact comes from brief suggestions in the performances: the quickly suppressed look of panic in an illiterate Romeo’s eyes, as he’s given a baby book to read to his daughter; or Julie’s face contorted by bitterness and confusion as she encounters, for the first time, the baked-in class prejudice of elite universities.

The social realist vision may be slightly undercut by mannered incarnations of Julie’s parents, though heightened performances from Hosking and Greenstone do accentuate the cruel pragmatism (and the fear) behind their class values.

And however gruelling the play’s transformation from romantic to social tragedy, Kamarra Bell-Wykes has directed the central relationship in Romeo & Julie with sensitivity and emotional assurance.

Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge ★★★★★
Musica Viva, Hamer Hall, July 21

Still the biggest name in English choral music, the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge is well on the way to selling out its ninth Australian tour for Musica Viva.

In the five years since its last appearance here, the choir has been re-energised by its current director Daniel Hyde, who is unafraid to take the nearly 500-year-old choir in new directions. Such directions do not always lead to the comfortable, feel-good church music with which the choir is primarily associated.

Take the newly commissioned Charlotte. Written by Sydney composer Damian Barbeler and based on the award-winning poem by Judith Nangala Crispin, On Finding Charlotte in the Anthropological Record, the score evokes the poet’s anguished, 20-year search for traces of her Indigenous heritage.

Barbeler’s challenging but well-written score delves deeply into the anger and frustration born of losing identity and family. Bringing impressive technical skill and fervent emotion to their task, the singers have invested Crispin’s poignant experience with urgency as well as understanding.

Further challenging listening came in the concert’s second half. Morten Lauridsen’s popular O magnum mysterium was presented in instrumental guise before the movements of Stravinsky’s rarely performed Mass were interleaved with works by Judith Weir, currently master of the King’s music and celebrating her 70th-birthday year.

Stravinsky’s quirky, astringent harmonies were fearlessly delineated by the choir and the accompanying 10-part wind and brass ensemble. Weir’s engaging, rhythmic setting of Psalm 148 and her three George Herbert settings collectively entitled Vertue provided a postmodernist contrast.

Opening the concert were more traditional liturgical items by Giovanni Gabrieli, Bull, Tallis, Grandi and Durufle sung with the choir’s trademark refinement, clarity and homogeneity, even in the relatively unhelpful acoustics of Hamer Hall.

A single encore, a Nunc dimittis by Orlando Gibbons, provided an exquisite end to an intrepid musical journey.

Reviewed by Tony Way

THEATRE
Trophy Boys ★★★★★
Arts Centre Melbourne, Fairfax Studio, until July 21

An excoriating takedown of toxic masculinity and corrosive male entitlement performed entirely in drag by an all-female and non-binary cast? Trophy Boys made waves when it premiered in Melbourne last year, and it’s back for a return season at mainstage venues around the country. You’d be remiss not to see it.

Centring on an all-boys debating team of four from an elite private school, Trophy Boys depicts the preparatory hour before their grand final, with the boys sequestered in a room that quickly begins to feel airless.

Forced to brainstorm the affirmative case for “feminism has failed women” – as portraits of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Michelle Obama and Malala Yousafzai overlook them – they unravel precipitously.

The boys catapult between well-constructed, philosophical arguments on why feminism has failed women – it’s not intersectional enough, it’s too focused on equality at a corporate level, it plays into the fallacy of “choice” – and the kind of textbook misogyny that no amount of intellectual reasoning can combat.

This cognitive dissonance – between what the boys are saying versus the deep-rooted misogyny within each of them – reaches an apex when a startling revelation prompts them to shed all artifice and turn on one another.

Emmanuelle Mattana, the talented multi-hyphenate writer and star of Trophy Boys, has crafted a script that’s as impudent and uproarious as it is dark and disturbing.

The play starts out as a light and lovable romp that pokes fun at the performance of gender – a crowd-pleasing highlight is when the boys gyrate and contort to the tune of Pretty Ricky’s Grind With Me in hilariously exaggerated and camp displays of sexualised masculinity.

But then the tone perceptibly shifts – aided by Katie Sfetkidis’ subtle yet effective lighting changes – as the play hurtles through its final act, operating on layer upon layer of meaning that it deconstructs and puts together several times over. The most important debate is not the one they’re preparing for, but the one happening in the room – but at what cost will they win it?

Mattana nails lynchpin character Owen, a supercilious brainiac hellbent on achieving his dream of becoming prime minister. Leigh Lule is suitably intense as the brooding David, Fran Sweeney-Nash expertly balances menace and humour as the swaggering ball of machismo Jared, and Gaby Seow beautifully blends vulnerability with explicit displays of masculinity and internalised homophobia as the hapless Scott. These characters all draw on archetypes, but they’re complex and nuanced, teeming with humanity even as they deny it to those they hurt the most.

Mattana was a high-school champion debater and her intimate knowledge of this world shines through. That the story has some similarities to the historical sexual assault allegations made against former attorney-general Christian Porter, himself a high school debater, is no accident – it’s the inspiration behind the play. Porter always strenuously denied the allegation and was never charged by police.

Women are both absent and shockingly present in Trophy Boys. There’s a moment towards the end when all four actors momentarily drop the shackles of playing men to illustrate significant moments of systemic abuse against women – it’s electrifying theatre, one of many such moments in the jam-packed 70 minutes.

Reviewed by Sonia Nair

The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it every Friday.