Sydney Theatre Company’s Whitefella Yella Tree; New Now 2025 by Omega Ensemble, The Taming of the Shrew, Mauritius, Gary Daley

This can get a little frustrating: there are many, many words, which don’t always mean anything. Thankfully for the drama, the sheer weight of the unspoken explodes every so often into shouting, technicolour swearing and hand-to-hand fighting.

The outbursts are shockingly powerful at such short range, and the slaps, grapples and falls, choreographed by Diefo Retamales, feel real enough to make the audience gasp.

On first night, the wall-to-wall tension also breaks out into grins and laughter, some intentional, some not. Strangely enough, this only heightens the exhilarating sense of headlong rush, and the nifty adlibbing with which cast members paper over verbal stumbles is all part of the charm. This is, after all, the epitome of in-your-face live theatre. Anything could happen.

THEATRE
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW
Wharf 2 Theatre, until October 15
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★

No one has the nerve to let this play just be in a woke world. So a man treats a woman badly. Does this not happen? Should it not be depicted? Women also treat men badly – or, more to the point, people treat each other badly. But director Tasha O’Brien, for The Playwrought Project, decided to gender-swap every character in The Taming of the Shrew.

The concept of seeing the roles reversed was not without merit, had it been fully followed through. Alas, Petruchio, although now female, still goes by that name, and Kate, although now male, is still Kate. Surely, we could at least have had a Petruchia and a Kade – or perhaps a Cain, to add some wanton biblical subtext.

It’s as though the play’s seen through a kaleidoscope of gender-distorting mirrors, or twisted into a puzzle that must be deciphered at every turn. This adds another layer of confusion, when Shrew already deals in subterfuge and mistaken identity, and it neither illuminates the text nor compounds the comedy.

Nor is it necessary. In 1976, San Francisco’s extraordinary American Conservatory Theatre barely tampered with the text and presented a production (still commercially available) that’s a contender for the funniest Shakespeare you’ll see. A key to the success, beyond the extraordinary performances, direction and design, was that the company understood the crucial fact that seems to evade most interpreters: Petruchio doesn’t just tame Kate; Kate tames Petruchio.

Contextualised this way, the play is no piece of misogynist graffiti, but rather a hilarious satire of the nature of love and sexual politics. Instead, we endure it done O’Brien’s way, with no enlightenment at the end of the gender-swapped tunnel. Not only is it rather sad that a true understanding of the play is so rare, it also means that, messed with like this, much genuine comedy is reduced to shouting and farce.

But let’s try to shovel sexual politics aside (if that’s possible with Shrew!), and discuss what’s right (including the expert editing to just 70 minutes), for there are some splendid performances tucked away in the production’s nooks and crannies. These include Mike Howlett being effortlessly funny in the minor role of Biondello, Erin Bruce as a surprisingly elegant Gremio and Megan Elizabeth Kennedy as the wily Tranio.

The leads have a harder time because their characters have been poked and grafted until they are almost unplayable. I had no sense of the Kate that Mitchell Bourke was saddled with trying to convey (nor of the irony implicit in her closing speech of supposed subservience), nor of Will Manton’s Bianca or Natasha Vickery’s Petruchio.

No credible protagonists, no play. And yet, curiously, in the face of all this reinvention, the design elements take us to some mythical matriarchal Renaissance, which could have worked delightfully had the production found a way of being true to both itself and the text.

MUSIC
GARY DALEY
The Church, September 26
Reviewed by JOHN SHAND
★★★★

In both his piano-playing and his composing, Gary Daley has a way of making aural images appear out of – and retreat back into – aural mists. Had this ensemble not included drums, there’d have been few hard outlines: just malleable, soft-focus harmony and melody, hingeing on a keen feel for rhythm.

Daley unveiled a 90-minute suite, Round the Sun, scored for keyboards, guitar, bass, drums and eight-voice choir, which was thematically cohesive without becoming samey. It diverged rhythmically, texturally and in mood, but kept us in a specific sonic world – even when stretched to embrace John Lennon’s Across the Universe.

Despite the suite’s inception lying in Daley’s being severely afflicted by Covid, it’s more a song of hope than a diary of suffering, expressed with his innately restrained sense of beauty.

This was immediately evident on the opening Breath, blurring improvising quartet and wordlessly singing choir. Not that contrast was absent. Soma had a blistering feature from guitarist Hilary Geddes, who happily adds some of the grit and grunge to her sound that too many clone-like jazz guitarists eschew.

Qualia had a solo prelude from drummer Chloe Kim, who was obliged to try working within fairly strict dynamic constraints, given the lively acoustics of the venue, a sibling of the fabulous Phoenix Central Park.

But constraints are creative spurs to artists of Kim’s sophistication, as she alternated tinkling cymbals, jolting blocks of drums and delicate punctuations.

Qualia itself featured a poetic Daley at the Fazioli concert grand, and a singing unison melody from piano and guitar (carrying echoes of Keith Jarrett and Sam Brown in the 1970s). Geddes’ solo prelude led us into Across the Universe, which, gently sung by Arlo Sim (plus choir), slotted seamlessly into the suite, its refrain of “nothing’s going to change my world” enunciating the work’s inherent theme of resilience.

For the blithe melody of Spiders, Daley swapped to his magnificent Guerrini accordion, playing over an intrinsically edgy 5/4 groove. Nothing to Leave, a solo bass feature from Jacques Emery, was a little cosmos of its own, juxtaposing the sheer weight of the lowest bowed notes with flurries of higher pizzicato sighs and cries.

The ensemble seemed to relax more thereafter, evident in the intensifying rhythm and playful piano/guitar exchanges of Ghost in the Machine. Daley’s solo piano piece, Nothing to Show, exemplified his unerring sense of space and placement before Round the Sun segued into Begin Again, with a burst of melodic opulence from the piano giving way to a repeated chant from the choir, and a sense of the circle being completed.

It would be interesting to hear the piece in a room with even more scope for drama in the drums’ dynamics – but perhaps that would harden the lines and lessen the mistiness. Any arts festival picking up this project will be proud to have done so.

MUSIC
New Now 2025
Omega Ensemble, Utzon Room, September 25
Reviewed by PETER MCCALLUM
★★★

Omega Ensemble’s CoLab program provides workshops over several months for young composers to test ideas with expert instrumentalists in the context of mentoring by leading composers from Australia and overseas.

The results, as heard in this concert, were four pieces where the concepts were carefully worked through with nothing half-baked. Although some passages seemed written against the instruments and stretched the quintet of clarinet, violin, viola, cello and piano (who needless to say rose to the challenge) one felt these were decisions designed to test boundaries rather than patience.

Sad to say, in a group of young creatives, the first two works dealt with different aspects of mourning. Breathwork by Oliver John Cameron (NSW) was in what might be called a post-minimalist style, repeating short motifs to measure out the passage of time with constantly varying periodicity, thus creating textures of great rhythmic complexity. The outer sections had a wistful, sometimes breezy mood, while a slow inner section used sustained notes which created moments of mellowness and warmth. Cameron’s underlying metaphor was the meditative aspect of swimming, mimicking the rhythms of breathing and eddying water.

A Letter for Mardi by Alexandra Mison (Queensland) was an essay in capturing still, intensely-felt emotion, beginning with slowly moving harmonic progressions amid dreamy caressing gestures and sparkles of light from the piano. It moved to more animated music but maintained the use of sudden harmonic shifts to intensify feeling in a way reminiscent of cinematic styles.

Unravelling by Cassie To (NSW) had an environmental theme, beginning with active textures of swirling, scurrying energy to represent the interdependent intricacy of the Murray-Darling Basin river system. The music slowed for an evocative birdcall section which then become ominously still, as though haunted by threat and uncertainty. When the activity returned, it was with more biting edge and hammered chords which led to collapse. The closing sections featured incongruous notes leading to a bludgeoning close.

State of Flux by Callum O’Reilly (WA) started arrestingly with the word ‘breathe’ on a recorded track which initiated frenetic playing and cross-string passagework from the instruments which quickly petered out until prodded again by the recorded track. Its middle sections (OUT OF NOWHERE, THE MIND COMES FORTH and WHO IS THIS?) moved to soft tremelos and still, sustained sounds and, later, high fluttering evanescent textures. The close (EGO DEATH DANCE) was rhythmically complex and active with the players negotiating tricky unison passages in irregular rhythms conveying wild, trance-like physical activity.

THEATRE
Whitefella Yella Tree
Wharf Theatres, Sydney Theatre Company, until October 18
Reviewed by CASSIE TONGUE

Whitefella Yella Tree is a new, great Australian love story, and it’s set in the time before this place was forced into that name, and forcibly changed, by colonisation.

Ty (Joseph Althouse), teenage apprentice storyteller for his River Mob, and Neddy (Danny Howard), a young Mountain Mob warrior in the making, have been appointed messengers for their people. At a meeting place near a lemon tree, they share information about the new white people who have arrived on their Country.

As they exchange stories, bicker, and talk, they fall in love. It’s giddy and glorious.

But that new lemon tree is growing. The boys stand on the cusp of mass dispossession, violence, and change, and are going to have to make impossible choices about how to survive. How do you hold onto each other when a shocking new force wants to drive you apart?

Palawa writer Dylan Van Den Berg has crafted a connection that sings and zings, making you smile and blush along with the pair as they try to impress each other, find new ways to tease each other, and learn to flirt together. It’s a love story to fall in love with, and it’s no surprise that the play and production has been picked up by Sydney Theatre Company after its beautiful first season by Griffin Theatre Company in 2022.

Watch this poetic, tender and deftly plotted play become a new Australian classic.

This is a story that restores queer identities and relationships to the sacred places they have held in Indigenous culture for thousands of years, before they were hidden and turned sour by restrictive colonial ideas of sexuality and gender, often imposed via conservative Christianity. We see this great loss begin to happen in the play, and we also see that Ty and Neddy’s love is precious and jewel-like: it glows. You want to hold it in your hand and protect it. It aches to know you can’t.

Althouse and Howard, both new to the production (the roles were played at Griffin by the brilliant pair of Guy Simon and Callan Purcell), are excellent, with an endearing and lovably awkward sense of self-discovery that’s richly funny and quietly moving. Co-directors Declan Greene and Amy Sole have lovingly built Ty and Neddy’s intimate world, shaping scenes that come alive with conversation and embrace the new physicality of people growing into their own bodies.

Now in a bigger theatre than the play’s first home at Griffin, the scenes still feel intimate, though Mason Browne’s set has to work harder to frame and hold them in space. Kelsey Lee and Katie Sfetkidis’ lighting design holds them too, with rich afternoon suns and cool evenings and sudden shifts into darkness and danger, their sky a friend and warning; composer Steve Toulmin helps the love story echo through time.

If you didn’t see Whitefella Yella Tree in 2022, don’t miss your chance to see it now. You’ll want to say you were there at the beginning – that you watched this poetic, tender and deftly plotted play become a new Australian classic.

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