This stormy tale set in a Greek restaurant serves up more than drama

The Age

6 days ago

A piteous desperation attends Julie's desire for agency, and there's irony in her abusing the unearned power she does have. Meanwhile, John's arc feels depressing and familiar from headlines: the brooding romantic lead has a manipulative streak latent in his performance, allowing Yena's Kristina to provide a window onto what is – however complicated the situation – clearly predatory male sexual behaviour.
I'm not sure about the surprise twist at the end. It didn't quite land as tragedy and suffered the same issue as the lurid approach to some of the play's (admittedly blatant) symbolism.
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In lieu of decapitating Julie's pet bird, for instance, John sticks it in a food processor and presses the button. The audience laughed at the gory substitution – a spell-breaking moment in a production which, at its best, summons the moody extremities and intense performances that make Strindberg's battle of the sexes so compelling.
Finally, the restaurant theme has added allure for those who can afford to splash out. Premium tickets include a Greek-inspired immersive dining experience by celebrity chef Conor Curran.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
THEATRE
What's Yours ★★★★
Red Stitch Actors' Theatre, until August 24
To have kids or not to have kids? A newfound sense of urgency in Keziah Warner's play What's Yours is injected into the debate, which is more alive than ever amid the broadening of possibilities that mean more people can have children, even as the ever-deteriorating state of the world complicates the decision itself.
The play kicks off decades in the past, the liminal age of youth and opportunity distilled into a moment of carefree drunkenness at a sharehouse party.
Lia (Carissa Lee) and Jo (Christina O'Neill) are best friends and housemates. Simon (Kevin Hofbauer) is a stranger who first desires Jo, and then, years into the future, Lia. Obscured by a gauzy curtain, the flashback has an ephemeral, otherworldly feel.
When the curtains are pulled back, we're firmly in the present. Simon and Lia are struggling to conceive, and hear through the grapevine that Jo, whom they haven't spoken to in years, has frozen eggs that she doesn't intend to use. They reach out, hoping for a display of magnanimity from someone they've hurt deeply. The result plays out over the course of the next few years as their loyalties, motivations and feelings shift and morph.
What's Yours is a meditation on power, desire, mortality, the ethics of friendship, the limits of possession, and the enduring legacy of the choices we make. The minutiae of each of these characters' decisions are placed under the microscope, as they extort one another for answers and defend their right to live the way they envisioned for themselves.
Warner's story bypasses familiar beats in favour of something altogether fresh and new. When justifying why they respectively do and don't want children, Lia talks about wanting to feel a love so enveloping it hurts her. Jo wants to do whatever she wants; if that something is nothing, so be it.
Perhaps due to the contracted nature of the play, Lia and Jo are necessarily cleaved into neat binaries. Lia's so blinkered that she can't contemplate why someone wouldn't want a child, while Jo is so disconnected from the prospect that she doesn't know how to interact with a parent.
The actors expertly inhabit these thorny, complex, highly flawed characters. O'Neill is a highlight as the sardonic, defensive and staunch Jo, while Lee embodies the seesaw of open-heartedness and despair that Lia experiences. Hofbauer, more recently seen in Red Stitch's Comeuppance, brings to life the agitated, morally vacillating Simon.
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Under Isabella Vadiveloo's direction, the characters pace around a dining table planted in the centre of the stage.
No actor is ever completely off-stage; the ghost of their presence a spectre haunting the other two in their absence as they loom behind a curtain. Bianca Pardo's set oscillates between being a domestic space and a public space through minute changes to the onstage furniture. The same could be said for the characters' outfits, which subtly shift as they age and move through different ways of being.
Who you identify with in this piece and how you relate to it will hinge on your relationship to the question of kids. What's Yours invites projection as it interrogates the necessary sacrifices and payoffs of modern living.
Reviewed by Sonia Nair
JAZZ
Troy Roberts Quartet ★★★★
The JazzLab, July 31
Sometimes, life has a way of jolting you into the present with a reminder of its fragility and unpredictability. At the JazzLab last Thursday, just minutes before Troy Roberts and his band were due on stage, a medical emergency in the audience resulted in a venue evacuation and plenty of sombre reflection as we waited outside.
When the ambulance departed an hour later (with the patient in a stable condition) and we filed back indoors, the mood was understandably muted, drained of the anticipatory buzz that typically greets Roberts before every performance. The Australian saxophonist has called New York home for 20 years now, so his legion of fans jumps at the chance to hear him whenever he returns here.
And it's not hard to see why. Any apprehension that the subdued atmosphere might linger was banished within seconds of the band's arrival onstage. A burst of cleansing energy from drummer Andrew Fisenden announced the opening tune – Solar Panels – before the rest of the quartet leapt on board.
As a composer, Roberts keeps his bandmates on their toes with elaborate, rhythmically complex tunes. Yet even without a proper rehearsal, Fisenden, Brett Williams (on piano) and Sam Anning (bass) navigated the variable time signatures, tempo shifts and rhythmic fillips with apparent ease, beaming with delight as they moved in lockstep with their animated leader.
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Roberts' arrangements of standards also contained elements of surprise: The Look of Love was taken at an unusually jaunty pace, the rhythm section conjuring a Latin feel beneath Roberts' agile tenor spirals, while Up Jumped Spring saw the quartet skipping back and forth between a flowing waltz and a breezy 4/4 swing.
On Coltrane's Transition, Roberts and guest saxophonist Carl Mackey both offered volcanic solos that tapped into the composer's earthy spirituality. Wise One was gorgeously restrained, with Roberts' majestic, elongated phrases resting on a bed of rippling piano and shimmering percussion.
A joyously ebullient calypso tune followed, then – as a coda – a brief but heartfelt ballad, sending us out into the night feeling uplifted and reassured.