As the third part slides into irony, Sava Vemic mixed a wonderfully blooming bass voice with a laconic equivocal characterisation, and Andrew Goodwin played the jester with golden sound and uncertainty as he decides that he would prefer to just stay dead. Warwick Fyfe had the last word in spoken song (sprechstimme) with masterly modulation of pitch and rhythm and an astonished stare as nature reasserts itself in the early morning.

Such a large orchestra as this enlarged SSO is always fascinating to hear, not only for the moments of all-enveloping sound but the extra blush of colour in the 36 violins, the sparkling intricate tapestry of 23 woodwind players and four harps, the premonitory bluntness of 25 brass, and the clattering chaos that nine percussion and piano players can generate.

The combined choirs of Sydney Philharmonia, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Chorus sang with balanced resplendence in the final number. As Waldemar’s “undead” retainers, raised from the grave to ride across Gurre lake for all eternity, the male singers battled the orchestral forces with strength and definition.

Schoenberg, the always controversial modernist, was born 150 years ago. It is auspicious for Simone Young’s leadership of the SSO that she chose to mark that event with this early masterpiece never before heard in Sydney, rather than the more obvious gesture of honouring Bruckner’s bicentenary.

Not Now, Not Ever: A Parliament of Women
Belvoir Downstairs
March 15
Reviewed by CASSIE TONGUE
★★★
Not Now, Not Ever: A Parliament of Women, drawing inspiration from Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen, isn’t just putting a new spin on a classic play, it’s driven to glee by its newness.

That’s thanks to Margaret Thanos, a rising-star writer-director. Fresh off a new take on Timon of Athens the Herald called “the pinnacle of Shakespeare in Sydney this century”, Thanos has put her restless, relentlessly inspired brain on display.

Not Now, Not Ever, is only barely contained by the tiny Belvoir downstairs stage; it’s a barrelling, gambolling satire that is working overtime to make its audience laugh – and mostly succeeds In Thanos’ take, a challenge made by goddess Athena (a witty Richard Hilliar) to unseat her father Zeus (Rachael Colquhoun-Fairweather, who runs away with every scene she’s in) can only be settled by meddling in Australia’s federal election.

Whichever god has the winning candidate can preside over the rest in the pantheon, but there’s a catch: Athena’s candidate must be a woman, and it would be Australia’s first female prime minister (that an extended Julia Gillard appearance – of a sort – comes late in the play shouldn’t be overthought).

Soon Prax (Emma O’Sullivan) is called to leave her manure business to fight for national change – but bold ideas don’t win elections. Will she succeed with her trusty goat best friend Gora (Lib Campbell) by her side, or will Zeus’s candidate (Matt Abotomey), the folksy battler of baby-boomer dreams, take the role?

Can Hermes (a lovely Clay Crighton), the play’s moral centre, keep the gods in line? And what’s up with Aunty (Ava Madon), whose daffy tea readings and close-up magic might hide awesome power?

Thanos has worked extensively in comedy, sketch, and activism, and these influences ring strong here. Her instincts for a laugh are often (but not always) sharper than her satire, and indulgence in bits (including clowning, dance, playful music cues and homage paid to Aristophanes’ scatological jokes) gives the play a hefty running time that drags it down.

Still, the cast is disarmingly funny, the set – a cardboard backdrop with a butler’s desk of hidden compartments (Jess Zlotnick) – is a pleasure, and the production is informed by queer performance, humour, and politics, which rewards the gender-twisting plot and grants every member of the cast a fair moment in the spotlight. It’s hard to be mad at an overload of ideas for diluting the whole when the separate pieces are so charming.

The Great Divide
Ensemble Theatre, March 14
Until April 27
Reviewed by HARRIET CUNNINGHAM
★★½

There’s a scene towards the end of David Williamson’s new play, The Great Divide, where the two central characters, property magnate Alex Whittle and local anti-development activist Penny Poulter, face off in a televised presidential-style debate. The journalist mediates the to and fro, in which the characters rehash the positions they’ve been occupying since the beginning of the play, before saying, “And that’s all we have time for…”

If only it was.

The latest output of Williamson’s post-retirement career is a morality play that revisits many of the playwright’s lifelong touchstones, from the scourge of neo-liberalism to the blight of inequity in small-town Australia. It is set in Wallis Heads, a run-down but beautiful regional town somewhere on the coast of Australia that is being circled by marauding capitalists.

The property developer wants Wallis Heads to be the next Noosa. The mayor wants the best for the community. The local resident wants affordable rent. The local resident’s daughter wants to be a professional surfer. The local newspaperman wants a good story. The developer’s down-trodden assistant just wants a break. Drama ensues.

The Great Divide, directed by Ensemble Theatre Artistic Director Mark Kilmurry, involves six characters and two hours of battering to and fro, but it feels like an angry monologue. Every character speaks at the same pitch and pace and no one listens.

This works well in the case of the stock villain, Alex Whittle, played with energy and magnetism by Georgie Parker. Alex gets the job of schooling us in the trickledown economic theories of Milton Friedman with a side of modern-day greenwashing, all served with withering contempt for everyone around her. She may be dressed in white but, we get it, she’s the baddie.

Then there is Penny Poulter, a single mum who stacks shelves at the local IGA and wants her daughter, Rachel, to have a brighter future. Penny is also dressed in white but she’s the goody. However, in spite of a solid performance from Emma Diaz, she’s hard to warm to because she is as unnuanced and cliched as her rich rival. It’s no wonder that Rachel (a promising debut from Caitlin Burley) prefers catching the perfect wave to listening to her mother’s tales of unfulfilled promise on the cruel trudge down struggle street.

Then there is Grace (Kate Raison). Grace is Alex Whittle’s right-hand woman, who spends the duration clip-clopping across the stage in high heels and a pencil skirt, in a baffling caricature of the loyal retainer who endures round-the-clock bullying from her boss. Grace, we are told, has been working for Alex for 17 years, but senses she is about to be fired. (Why did she put up with her for so long? Why is her latest minor infringement a firing offence? And why would Alex discard a still fit-for-purpose punching bag?)

Wallis Heads’ bumbling Mayor, Alan Bridger, a perfect fit for John Wood, and editor of the local rag, Brian (an earnest James Lugton), make up the numbers in this parade of caricatures and the plot rolls on via various not very twisty twists to reach a suitable conclusion.

There is a moment of redemption, a mother-daughter reconciliation that gives Penny the winning hand in the final debate and the promise of a happy ending. Sadly, by this time we don’t really care.