So, even as Esme lands her dream gig working at the scrippy, the young woman makes it her mission to record and rescue as many words as she can – a quest that draws her into circles invisible to male scholars, from the potty-mouthed screeds of Old Mabel (Ksenja Logos), a retired sex worker at the local market, to the rhetorical fire of Esme’s friend Tilda (Angela Mahlatjie), an actor turned radical suffragette.

A synopsis would spoil the plot – and reveal just how novel-like the adaptation remains. The first half, especially, crams in far too much exposition without enhancing drama or playing to theatre’s strengths. It isn’t lugubrious, exactly, but it is extraordinarily verbal, sidelining the qualities of live performance words cannot touch. Even those who think so-called “literary theatre” no bad thing may find the play overconservative, aesthetically.

Politically, it’s another story, and the more the show illustrates through human relationships that uncontroversial proposition – language is shaped by those with power – the more compelling the drama becomes.

Women’s oppression and the sisterhood of resistance to it are portrayed, from the inside, without anachronism. Scenes with the kindly, sharp-minded Esme and her motley crew of female friends open like a pop-up book from between the covers of patriarchal society.

Under Jessica Arthur’s direction, the ensemble acting is solid, if sometimes constrained by the script. And, apart from Max Lyandvert’s eccentric sound, the production design is excellent.

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Jonathon Oxlade’s set conjures in detail the cloistered bookish atmosphere of the scrippy, its authenticity augmented by Ailsa Paterson’s attractive period costume. And the stage is overhung by live projections that lend momentum to the storytelling and memorably capture traumatic events – a bullying scene, a death scene – with wordless intensity.

More such moments might have shone out, had the show’s verbiage not been so dense, and with no change from three hours, careful pruning wouldn’t have hurt.

Word lovers will forgive it, though, and if you enjoyed the novel, this faithful adaptation will be right up your alley.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

THEATRE
7 Captiva Road ★★
Chapel Off Chapel, until March 3

This kitchen sink drama thrusts audiences into the heart of a dysfunctional Italian American family. They go hammer and tongs at each other even at the best of times, but they’re currently in crisis mode. All of them have returned home to Boston to grieve their dying matriarch, and long-simmering tensions flare – not so much at the anticipation of loss or the stress of palliative care, but at cumulative failures and buried trauma gone tragically unnoticed, only to resurface in the crucible of grief.

It’s a rugged play with some unusual strengths and unfortunate weaknesses. The production does sport a 10-strong cast, for instance, and director Cathy Hunt treats the scattershot dialogue as free composition. I loved the way the texture of the dialogue keeps tumbling into acrimony and distress. The familiar patterns of domestic discord often sound authentic – this family has a habit, as one character notes, of “turning olive branches into arrows” – and let’s face it, talking over each other while remaining comprehensible is a difficult thing to achieve, even with committed ensemble acting.

Love does lurk in quiet moments, despite the damaging secrets this family has kept, but maladaptive patterns keep rising to poison it. Some keen individual performances channel that dynamic with intuitive ease, including Mikhaela Ebony’s dutiful Frankie, burning with private rage, and PiaO’Meadhra as her lesbian cousin Joanne, who looks and feels like a changeling desperate to fly away.

Less sharp is the dramatic structure. 7 Captiva Road has some odd beats that don’t advance drama or character, and it sounds at times as if it’s been half-adapted from a screenplay or TV series. Certainly, a longer format would allow a deeper voyeuristic sense to percolate through the piece, and give more than a glimpse of backstory to the feuds and antagonisms between relatives who can’t stand each other.

There is, too, nothing intrinsically American about this story. The script could easily have been tweaked into an Australian idiom, which might have saved us some wobbly Boston accents and freed the actors to breathe more nuance into the low-key realism.

Design-wise, the down-at-heel suburban home looks apt but has been constructed (on a shoestring to be fair) in a way that impedes natural movement for performers entering and exiting. And the night I went, there were lighting issues so frequent they almost needed an epilepsy warning.

Anthropocene Theatre remains an indie company to watch, even if this one’s a mixed bag.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead

MUSIC
3MBS Music Marathon ★★★★
Melbourne Recital Centre, February 24

The annual 3MBS marathon has become a keenly anticipated fixture on the Melbourne music calendar. The five concerts usually focus on a single composer – Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert – but Saturday’s series at the Melbourne Recital Centre’s Primrose Potter Salon took a far more abstract theme: transfiguration.

Curated for the second year by much-loved Melbourne violinist Wilma Smith, the program was built around Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night in honour of the Austrian composer’s 150th anniversary. But it traversed continents and centuries in its multicultural and historical breadth, from Renaissance Europe to Indigenous composer Aaron Wyatt’s new viola concerto, to a Hindu-based work by the Hari Sivanesan Trio.

Schoenberg’s string sextet is a masterpiece of late romanticism, written before he took the second Viennese school into serialism, and Zoe Black, Jos Jonker (violin), Christopher Moore, Eunise Chen (viola), Molly Kadarauch and Daniel Smith (cello) gave a lush, beautifully balanced and dramatic account that was entirely convincing.

In contrast, baroque trio Latitude 37 played three sets of variations, including Biber’s Rosary Sonata No. 4, filled with delicate nuance and rich harmonies.

The concert in which every single seat was filled featured the Fidelio Quartet in a fiery and exciting account of Beethoven’s Harp Quartet, and the superb Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen (now artistic director of the Australian National Academy of Music) in two celebrated Chopin works, Berceuse and Funeral March Sonata.

After stealing the show last year, Jumppanen did it again: his combination of power, poetry, dexterity and finesse with sometimes astounding speed brought rapturous applause.

The salon is the ideal venue for a chamber festival, imbuing every note with warmth and intimacy. Its extraordinary clarity means that every smudged note, every tiny failure of refinement, leaps out – yet the compensations vastly outweigh that.

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One could only conclude, again, that truly, Melbourne is blessed with the number and calibre of its chamber musicians.
Reviewed by Barney Zwartz

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