Any humour from the beleaguered mortal lovers – Abebe’s Hermia, Isabel Burton’s Helena, Laurence Young’s Lysander and Mike Howlett’s Demetrius – is left largely unmilked because they are made to be constantly angsty, unappealing people. Yes, they are a riddle to perform, but at the very least, we should sympathise more with Helena’s lovelorn plight.

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As good as Ngaropo is as Egeus and hilarious as Pyramus, he just misses something of the quality that should make us all love Bottom so: his equanimity – even when he finds himself half-ass.

Designer Teresa Negroponte takes the many references to “the wood” (as in “forest”) literally and gives us the wall of a dilapidated barn for a set, one filled with cunning holes to come and go and beams about which Puck, Oberon and Titania might leap and fly. And all the while Max Lyandvert’s music chimes and tinkles as if driven by the wind rather than mere mortal intervention.

Angelique Kidjo
Concert hall, Sydney Opera House, 6 March
Reviewed by SHAMIM RAZAVI
★★★★

The gap between band and audience may be mere centimetres, but until the crowd loosens up, it might as well be the Indian Ocean between us. On one shore, Kidjo and her band inhabit a vibrant, vital, sweaty dance hall, while on the other, we gaze across at a cultural treasure, politely clapping between songs despite her exhortations to ignore the seats and dance.

The mighty surroundings of the concert hall are not easily overcome, and it doesn’t help that Kidjo reminds us that her current tour has taken her from the Royal Albert Hall via our own grande dame and will end up at Carnegie Hall.

Exasperated at our restraint – a restraint born of a reverence for her contribution to the cultural permeation of (West) African music and to the movement that has evolved into Afrobeats – she chides us not to sing as though at a funeral.

The funeral finally ends, and the party begins a third of the way into the set with her cover of Talking Heads’ Once in a Lifetime. This number – reappropriating as it does the cultural influences of the original – provides the link between the Western and African musical idiom and embodies Kidjo’s repeated calls for us to recognise our fundamental unity as a human family.

Time and again, in both lyrics and anecdotes, the appeal to our higher selves rings loud: the need for world peace in Choose Love, the danger of environmental catastrophe in Mother Nature, and the importance of the equality of women and men in her countless stories all serve to elevate the night to something more than a mere party.

But hers is no dreary sermon but rather a joyous celebration of a 40-year career during which she has learnt a thing or two about getting even the most awkward audience into the groove. By the end of the night, we are all in that dance hall, unselfconsciously chanting along in full-throated Yoruba: Ashe e Maman Africa!

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