THEATRE
The Hall ★★★★
fortyfivedownstairs, until December 1

A poised three-hander from Ro Bright, The Hall is performed in the round and features a small Scared Harp choir, singing hymns in four-part harmony.

All art aspires to the condition of music, as Walter Pater noted, and although the chorus is an ancient dramatic device, theatre built around an actual choir is a rarer quantity. Choirs generally indicate transcendence, lifting a performance into a realm of unified abstraction, emotional intensity, or scale that theatre strains to reach alone.

Sometimes choirs dominate – as with Heiner Goebbels’ avant-garde When the Mountain Changed its Clothing in 2014, created with a 40-strong Slovenian girls’ choir, which was effectively a beautifully designed concert.

When drama and live choral music are integrated in a more balanced way, however, we’re usually in the presence of tragedy or comedy aspiring to the sublime.

It’s true of David Greig’s moving play The Events – about a mass murder targeting a multicultural choir – and equally of Aidan Fennessy’s final and finest work, The Heartbreak Choir, which contrasts the ridiculous smallness of individuals with the uplifting unity of a rural community gathering in song.

The Hall joins these works. It’s a fly-on-the-wall portrait of a family struggling to cope with the grim impacts of dementia – now the leading cause of death in Australia – on one of its members.

Grandmother Tup (Natasha Herbert) has been diagnosed in her early 50s. Her cognitive deterioration and behavioural problems cause havoc for daughter Ally (Brooke Lee) and 15-year-old grandchild Billie (Emmanuelle Mattana) who devise elaborate tactics to keep Tup living with them as long as they can.

Hints of a long-held secret amid Tup’s strict religious upbringing emerge. As her condition worsens, Ally devises a plan to fly her mum across the world for a choir convention – Tup organised and was devoted to a weekly choir for years – hoping to snatch one unforgettable moment of light from the encroaching darkness.

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It’s a striking if modest play, performed with crisp intimacy, and it deals with a situation that might have been unbearable to watch if not for the songs.

Herbert pulls no punches at the cruelty and humiliation of Tup’s plight. Its effect on her family is deftly sketched: the unsung heroism of Lee’s self-abnegating Ally, or the crushing moment when the irrepressible innocence of Mattana’s trans teen runs into the grim fact that Nan has forgotten to use the correct pronouns.

Any family faced with caring for a loved one with dementia, including mine, should be grounded and uplifted by The Hall.

For Tup, song is the last thing to go as her mind unravels, and the play’s sobering portrayal of domestic reality is elevated and transfigured by the sublime harmonies of a live choir, sitting among the audience.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
Troye Sivan | Something To Give Each Other Tour ★★★★
Sidney Myer Music Bowl, November 21

Troye Sivan begins by asking the crowd if they’re “motherf---ing ready to sweat”. He may be referencing the recent Sweat tour he co-headlined with pop icon Charli XCX, but what he’s ultimately doing is preparing everyone for what’s ahead: a sweaty, erotic and surprisingly heartwarming pseudo-club experience.

From the first track, Got Me Started, it’s clear this is more a feast for the eyes than for the ears.

Sivan and his six backup dancers contort their bodies to the beat, occasionally forming structured tableaus in which it’s difficult to tell where one body begins and another ends. Every movement is so precise, so high energy, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that Sivan is likely running on no sleep having just won three ARIA awards, including album of the year, in Sydney the night before.

Sivan has said he created his 2023 album Something To Give Each Other to both liberate himself and shine a spotlight on queer lived experiences. Now his sensuality is celebrated on-stage, through lap dances, a now-viral phallic microphone moment, and even a surprise make-out sesh near the end of the night. But while there’s plenty of sex, Sivan knows when to cool things down, replacing gyrating thrusts for graceful, balletic movements during heartfelt break-up ballads such as Still Got It.

After touring the US and Canada, Sivan is clearly glad to be back home. After all, he emerges from backstage in an “Aussies do it better” shirt, and even has his dancers wear outback cork hats while dancing what appears to be a club-rat version of the Nutbush.

“It feels so good to be home,” he says, before half-chastising the crowd for not going hard enough. “I’ve partied here before, I know how feral you can get, Melbourne.”

Sivan’s every wish is the crowd’s command, as it heaves to the pulsing beats of club songs such as Rush and Stud, and sways in time to his more introspective, sultry tracks like Heaven. He tells the fans, many of whom are dressed in his trademark leather assless chaps, to jump higher during Silly. Before you know it, people are closing their eyes, linking arms, and leaping for all they’re worth.

“He always slays this shit,” one awe-inspired fan says after One Of Your Girls, which features a video introduction of Sivan in full drag. Her friend responds: “Totally. I’m so sweaty right now.”

So Sivan, mission accomplished.
Reviewed by Nell Geraets

THEATRE
Cruel Britannia: After Frankenstein ★★★★
Arts Centre Melbourne, until November 30

Classic texts refracted and reimagined through the prism of trans experience are an irresistible lure for Kristen Smyth’s magnetic gifts. Her incarnation of Jesus, reborn as a trans woman in Jo Clifford’s The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven, subverted Christian dogma and left transcendent the inclusive ethical crux at the core of many New Testament parables.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a parable of modernity in which an unforgiving gender binary plays a crucial role. Victor Frankenstein’s fear of the feminine, and his masculine desire to usurp and control procreative power, are among the true monsters in the story; the abjection of Frankenstein’s creation – the monstrousness – is a dark mirror of the all-too-human impulse to fear and revile difference, to reject those do not conform to established ideas or social categories.

The gothic tale has long been fertile ground for queer subversion – The Rocky Horror Show, for one. Cruel Britannia is a more high-concept response, transporting us into a deeply imagined and liminal underworld in 1980s London under Thatcher.

It finds the gothic not in university basements and secret laboratories, mountain fastnesses and frozen Arctic seas, but among a homophobic milieu of working-class men, a queer subculture spiralling into new romanticism and punk and novel drugs, and in the torment of a trans woman struggling to emerge in a world that thinks her monstrous.

The text is moody in-yer-face theatre, the world-building brilliantly evocative. Although even those very familiar with the original may find the storytelling lacks expositional clarity, its sustained intensity, the atmosphere of uncanniness and threat created by gender conformity, and an outcast’s quest to find sanctuary all resonate with deeper truths that a more straightforward retelling might miss.

Violent rage and ecstatic release bubble up through the cracks – a reference to Derek Jarman’s darkly subversive queer classic Jubilee is clearly a touchstone. Smyth flickers wickedly between yobbish male personae and Ruby, a repressed female gender identity who cannot ultimately be denied, in a compelling dance with Shelley’s text.

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I had a few reservations. The show’s hedonistic riffs might be more fun if they were audience-responsive, rather than entombed behind a fourth wall; the monstering of masculine sexuality – whipped into paranoia and moral panic by TERFs and used to scapegoat trans women – isn’t made manifest with the sharpness or grotesquerie it could be. Neither undercuts the impressiveness of Smyth’s writing and solo performance, which let Cruel Britannia command attention as a trans theatre classic all its own.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

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