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This wrap of shows around Melbourne includes a gig by Sleaford Mods, a production inspired by a secret society and a five-star performance from a visiting pianist.
MUSIC
Sleaford Mods ★★★
The Forum, June 3
“It’s comedy, it’s make do, it’s ignorant and above all, it’s shit”. That’s Sleaford Mods’ Jason Williamson describing England four albums ago. The neo-punk bard of Nottingham is far from ignorant. But as a Frenchman once said, you are what you eat.
Sleaford Mods perform at The Forum in Melbourne on Saturday.Credit: Rick Clifford
Here’s how Sleaford Mods make do. Williamson barks his apoplectic vignettes of class farce, doom and squalor in side-profile to scorching lights. Andrew Fearne dances like the beardy guy at aerobics, stopping only to click-start each track on his laptop.
The minimalism is a big part of the deal. The intensity is hilarious. The rupturing electro grooves are compelling. The Forum is packed. The imagery is mostly impenetrable – even to the English bloke I chat to with the T-shirt bearing Johnny Rotten’s last words with the Sex Pistols: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
Nobody here feels cheated. Eighty bucks for a guy shouting over a laptop? We shrug and buy another $14 beer, cheer at the featured artists singing from the laptop: Florence Shaw on Force 10 From Navarone, Billy Nomates on Mork n Mindy, Perry Farrell on So Trendy. This being Melbourne and everything, Amyl & the Sniffers’ Amy Taylor actually is in the room. She stays in her seat as her disembodied voice kicks in on Nudge It. Sod it, that’ll do.
The Mods slam out 25 tunes about England’s losers, brawling in Sainsburys’ carpark, blaming foreigners for COVID, seething at the boss, hiding online purchases from the missus. UK GRIM, Tilldipper, Giddy on the Ciggies, Jobseeker, Bang Someone Out and Smash Each Other Up sound exactly like the records because that’ll do. We austerity tourists like to keep it real.
But compare the lust for life raging from the drums and guitars of local punk-shoegaze support act Enola. Singer Ruby Marshall looks fantastic, sounds hungry, every word and move laser-focused on transcendence. Their road won’t be easy. But they sure live in the lucky country.
Reviewed by Michael Dwyer
THEATRE
Climbers ★★½
Fever103 Theatre, fortyfivedownstairs, until June 11
Secret societies have a mysterious allure, a whiff of danger about them. Elly D’Arcy’s new play springs from a real one – the Night Climbers of Cambridge. This bold cabal scaled gothic rooftops of university colleges and town buildings in the 1930s, and prefigured what we now know as urban explorers. Books describing its activities are still popular among Cambridge students, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the playwright’s research could find not a single woman member.
Climbers at fortyfivedownstairs draws upon a real-life secret society. Credit: Harrison Baker
Climbers writes one into the gap.
Like her Shakespearean namesake, Rosalind (Meg Taranto) is a spirited and intelligent young woman with a taste for adventure. Never one to let gender stand in the way of experiencing life to its fullest, Rosalind gatecrashes the Night Climbers and soon matches Fred (Eddie Orton), George (Charlie Veitch), and Alex (Sebastian Li) for poetry and drinking, blood oaths and intrepid daredevilry.
Will she ever truly be one of the boys? Rosalind’s romantic and sexual discoveries are experienced as liberating, but her coming-of-age story is also an awakening to the shackles of patriarchal culture. Misogyny is rampant, and she must “work twice as hard and speak half as much” to achieve the same recognition as a man.
Rosalind’s coming-of-age story is also an awakening to the shackles of patriarchal culture.Credit: Harrison Baker
For Rosalind’s roommate Lucy (Veronica Pena Negrette) that misogyny has terrible consequences, and the drama builds to a powerful scene which juxtaposes the joy of Rosalind’s first sexual encounter with the aftermath of Lucy’s violation.
From there, the two young women show true courage, defying institutional silence to stage a daring protest, with a counterpoint to the boys’ club – a women’s communist brigade led by the ferocious Ruth (Tyallah Bullock) – standing in solidarity.
The production has charm, notably stylish set and costume design, and a large cast of emerging performers finding their feet. Taranto is luminous, fully inhabiting the heroine; Negrette a quietly devastating force. And the young male characters sketch their types with brisk economy.
Climbers does feel like it would be better condensed into a 90-minute play, or perhaps expanded into a miniseries to give the characters and historical setting more depth.
Contemporary sexual politics also loom large over D’Arcy’s feminist fantasy, in a way that militates against dramatic complexity and sometimes whitewashes historical reality.
The production has charm, notably stylish set and costume design, and a large cast of emerging performers finding their feet.Credit: Harrison Baker
It was impossible to legally consent to sodomy in the 1930s, for instance, and homosexuality was generally regarded with the same disgust as, say, rape or paedophilia are today. One feelgood scene obscures this.
On the other hand, even consensual sex with a woman could get young men banished from Cambridge – as poet William Empson was in the late 1920s – a fact that makes some later dialogue and action sound anachronistic.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
MUSIC
Garrick Ohlsson ★★★★★
Musica Viva, Melbourne Recital Centre, June 3
Last visiting on the cusp of COVID, American pianist Garrick Ohlsson has made a welcome return to Melbourne, confirming his undeniable artistic prowess in a program that radiated conviction and finesse.
Ohlsson’s extraordinary grasp of musical architecture was immediately apparent in Schubert’s popular Impromptu in C minor, where his elegant control of musical line was beautifully complemented by a subtle sense of colour in both the inner and outer parts.
Garrick Ohlsson has made a welcome return to Melbourne.Credit: Lyndon Mechielsen
A surefooted sense of musical direction also pervaded an authoritative account of Liszt’s titanic Sonata in B minor, in which Ohlsson projected a masterful sense of musical background and foreground. Unafraid to unleash the sonata’s dramatic vehemence, Ohlsson was also capable of moments of heart-stopping tenderness, not least at the work’s end. Occasionally Ohlsson’s no-nonsense approach to pacing created a longing for a little more silence between the music’s rhetorical utterances, but such a celebrated work admits many interpretations.
Ohlsson brought stylish and expressive pianism to Convocations, a new work commissioned for Musica Viva from Tasmanian composer Thomas Misson in which the development of two opposing themes occasioned some engaging, idiomatic writing for the piano.
A final bracket of works by Scriabin saw Ohlsson very much at home in this composer’s idiosyncratic sound world. Three etudes centred around C-sharp/D-flat blended poetry and precision, while the first of the Two Poems, Op. 32 in F-sharp major once again produced exquisite colouration. Ohlsson brought astonishing energy and bravura to the hyper-romantic maelstrom that is the Piano Sonata No. 5, Op. 53, crowning the recital with a barnstorming finish.
An encore of Chopin’s Nocturne in F-sharp major Op. 15 No. 2 brought the audience gently back to earth after this dazzling display of virtuosity. Ohlsson’s musical breadth and depth makes him one the piano’s most compelling advocates. Don’t miss an opportunity to hear him.
Reviewed by Tony Way
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