Best shows in Sydney June 2

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THEATRE Consent ★★★★ Seymour Centre Reginald Theatre, until June 24

Nina Raine's play Consent doesn't just ask us questions, it cross-examines us. Is morality innate? Are there degrees of rape? If you love someone, must you also love their flaws? Must you experience the same traumatic incident to truly empathise?

Anna Samson, Jennifer Rani, Anna Skellern and Jeremy Waters star in Outhouse Theatre Co's Consent.Credit: Phil Erbacher

Cross-examination, Tim tells us, is a very damaging form of communication, and he should know: he's a barrister. In fact, five of Raine's seven characters are lawyers, so they argue eruditely. Once or twice the playwright's voice peeps through proceedings, but otherwise she leaves them to tear themselves to shreds. Witnessing their bickering, lying, manipulation, lust and adultery is almost like watching a blood sport, except in sport there's usually someone to cheer. Here most of the characters are not just flawed, they’re unlikable and pitted with vices – yet we watch on enthralled.

The play centres around two couples whose relationships are decomposing: Jake (Jeremy Waters) and Rachel (Jennifer Rani), both lawyers, and Kitty (Anna Samson) and Edward (Nic English), who is also a lawyer. Tim (Sam O’Sullivan) is their unhappily single colleague. Zara (Anna Skellern), a friend of Kitty's, is single too. Finally, Jessica Bell plays a solicitor as well as Gayle, a rape victim in a case prosecuted by Tim, with Edward representing the unseen defendant.

"Who's my lawyer?" Gayle asks Tim, only to be told she doesn't get one. Only the defendant does. The legal system's adversarial nature is among Raine's targets, as is the selfishness that pollutes our relationships, while her wit takes aim at the prevailing childishness of the sex-craving adults. The men, with their thin ties and their shirts hanging out like their tongues after yet another big night on the turps, even look like schoolboys in director Craig Baldwin's exceptional production for Outhouse Theatre.

Outhouse Theatre Co, usually associated with new American work, here presents the Australian premiere of this London-set play by British playwright Raine. She gives us debasement of the human spirit, laced with sharp humour and an investigation of the nature of truth. All seven actors excel, with Jessica Bell like a lit fuse in Gayle's major confrontational scene. Soham Apte's cold, reflective set allows for the requisite fluidity of time and place, and Eliza Jean Scott's music is as deeply unsettling as the fact that everyone's moral compass has gone haywire. This is tense, gripping and surprisingly funny theatre.

Reviewed by John Shand

MUSIC Sleaford Mods ★★★★½ Opera House Joan Sutherland Theatre, June 2

Two men in shorts and T-shirts, set on dance and destruct.

One, bearded, is responsible for the sounds but now only has to trigger the computer, allowing him to dance, limbs going hither and yon, like he wandered into the party, found it to his liking and won't be leaving until sun-up. His name is Andrew Fearn.

The other, non-bearded, begins by clutching the microphone and a drink (non-alcoholic) in one hand while the other ritually, almost independently, flicks the side of his close-cropped head and ear. His name is Jason Williamson.

We couldn't help but dance and laugh at Sleaford Mods as part of Vivid Live.Credit: Daniel Boud

And he moves, too, like a Melbourne Sharpie circa 1974, all elbows and pistoning knees, mated with Madness’ nutty dance, all square hips and shoulders, before he twirls his hands at his hips and throws back his shoulders in camp splendour.

"Oh yeah, not another white bloke aggro band" – uh-uh, Sleaford Mods got in ahead of you. Except, no.

They dance. We dance. Dance to the steampunk machinery, the heavy press stamping out sheets of metal, the siren through a long deep pipe. Dance to the synth pop that might lean more often to gritty Sheffield than dandified London, but the difference isn't so much when you’re sweating.

Dance, too, to the sound of biker speed with beer chaser, punctuated by Williamson's barks and squawks, and Fearn revisiting Suicide's death-disco seductions somehow blended with John Barry cinematic grandeur.

Elsewhere in the torrent of narrow sounds you can hear the aggravation and provocation of Public Image Ltd and the hammer drill of Nine Inch Nails, the poking-in-the-eye vertical dance of Amyl and the Sniffers and the vertical interjections of Public Enemy's Bomb Squad.

We don't just dance, we laugh, too. At the savagery directed at the shamelessly venal merchants of cash and the mockery of the earnestly houseproud ("death to your DIY"), at the distaste for the faux bumbling of "Boris Johnson and the cheeky girls" and at the sympathy for the real fumbling of the well-intentioned.

Williamson is witty and brutal and self-aware. And despite the appearance of someone to bovver (or who gets his gear for "five pound 60, past midnight/He could’ve charged me twice the price"), he does respect and empathy just as well. It's why women like Florence Shaw from Dry Cleaning, Amy Taylor from Amyl and the Sniffers and Billy Nomates all share the stage (via sampled voices) with them. As does Perry Farrell, incidentally.

Or maybe they, too, want to dance "even when your heart hangs like a loose stool that won't drop/Even the threat of a bone-rubbing stroke won't make you stop". It makes sense when we’re all saying, "I want it all like a crack forest gateau/I do drugs in my head so I can still go to bed/As I pound the slabs of this dreamscape into X".

Reviewed by Bernard Zuel

MUSICWeyes Blood ★★★★Opera House Joan Sutherland Theatre, June 1

Every now and then you just have to sit back in the darkness and let an artist touch your heart. Weyes Blood's first of two shows at the Opera House for Vivid Live was one of those nights.

The high priestess of brooding, folksy chamber pop, Weyes Blood, aka Natalie Mering, pairs her gorgeous voice with heartbreaking ’70s-tinged songs of disconnection and isolation. Most arrive in waves of lush baroque sound that complement her vocals and heighten the drama.

Weyes Blood's Vivid Live set managed to balance bombastic and restrained moments.Credit: Jordan Munns

Mering kicked off with It's Not Just Me, It's Everybody, the opener from her new album, which served as a prelude to the catharsis to come. Subdued at first, the dreamy piano ballad evolved over six minutes and left us adrift but comforted by the idea that everyone else was hurting, too.

The prescient A Lot's Gonna Change reinforced the theme, a song from 2019's Titanic Rising that she last played in Australia in March 2020 as the world was on the brink of upheaval.

It's tempting to point to the 2019 tracks as the highlights. The stellar Andromeda and fun Everyday, with its faint Beach Boys vibe, were the most uplifting, and the encore of Something to Believe (the "thesis of the set") and a solo acoustic rendition of Picture Me Better ended the show on a high.

But the most haunting moment was the recent single God Turn Me into a Flower, where a sparser instrumental gave Mering's voice space to shine. Chord changes and crescendos came to the fore as Mering disappeared into silhouette in front of a collage of visuals from documentary maker Adam Curtis. A ghostly figure draped in a white cape, Mering had fans entranced as she flitted about the stage as if she were a candle flame.

The set struck a good balance between the bombast and the muted moments, and for all the themes of loneliness there was a resounding sense of hopefulness and optimism. If Weyes Blood was a phantom at the Opera House, she was a happy one.

Weyes Blood also performs at the Opera House Joan Sutherland Theatre on Sunday, June 4.

Reviewed by Michael Ruffles

THEATRE The Lucky Country ★★★★½ Hayes Theatre, until June 17

What is Australia's identity as a country? Who are Australians, exactly, and what do we stand for? In The Lucky Country, a new chamber musical with music and lyrics by Vidya Makan in collaboration with director Sonya Suares, national myth-making gets a well overdue shake-up.

Milo Hartill, writer Vidya Makan and Karlis Zaid starred in Hayes Theatre's The Lucky Country.Credit: Philip Erbacher

We meet Boy (Joseph Althouse), a Thitharr Warra 13-year-old who, inspired by Baker Boy's proud black artistry, begins to rebel against the settler narratives of Australia taught in the classroom. From there, we branch out from those old stories to get a wider view of the Australian experience.

Through swift musical vignettes we meet, among others: an aspiring Byron Bay nudist, a refugee in Mingoola growing a new garden; two older Australians from Far North Queensland who find unexpected love on a Contiki tour; a woman who confronts the dangers of walking home alone at night; and Australia herself, singing a sexy pop banger about all the ways she could murder you. The cast – Althouse, Makan, Dyagula, Milo Hartill, Jeffrey Liu, Kristal West and Karlis Zaid – are irresistible.

Slowly emerging through the numbers – which are playful, witty and disarming, choreographed by Amy Zhang – is a through line of subversion and open-hearted exploration. The jokes are clever and unexpected and the scenarios, all contained in beautiful, short songwriting, are complex. Projections (by Justin Harrison) help situate us in the world of each song, and for the most part, the transitions between songs and the tonal shifts move with grace and charm.

Makan is a gifted storyteller, and the songs she and Suares have created are extraordinary. They summon time, place and emotion in an instant by pastiching melodies drawn from pop, Oz rock, hip-hop and folk. In a breathtaking moment, musician Billy McPherson emerges with a yidaki and touches the sublime. Heidi Maguire as musical director keeps the heartbeat of the show strong.

As the show moves towards its conclusion, it breaks open to reckon with our history of war (challenging the glorification of diggers), cultural appropriation and global responsibility, before probing at the wounds baked into our national story by genocide, the stolen generations and the systemic harm done to Indigenous Australians – while honouring the resistance, cultures, resilience and ingenuity of the first people who defined, and cared for, this land.

The final two numbers are instantly unforgettable – they remind us that nothing about Australia is simple, and a story is never complete unless it includes all of us. It's remarkable.

Reviewed by Cassie Tongue

Sydney Morning Herald subscribers can enjoy 2-for-1 tickets* to the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales during June 2023. Click here for more details.

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