Nick Cave moves from howling rage to heartbreak in electric ...
April 26, 2024 — 12.21pm
MUSICNick Cave ★★★★Plenary Hall, Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, until April 27
On his last visit to Australia, Nick Cave played the wild and lovely surrounds of Hanging Rock; on this tour, he has been booked to play Plenary Hall, a very grand, utterly soulless venue in Melbourne’s Convention and Exhibition Centre. The ceilings are high. The carpet is plush. The seats are several different shades of green, all of them virulent.
Nick Cave performs at Hanging Rock in November 2022. Credit: Richard Clifford
The mismatch between venue and artist is not lost on Cave. “This is an extraordinarily awful, corporate building,” he remarks, midway through the show. “I say that with all the love in the world.”
What Plenary Hall lacks in beauty, it makes up for with acoustics. Cave’s voice booms and breaks, oscillating between the evangelical and the intimate. The warm, honeyed tones of the piano fill the space. As he moves through stripped-down, unadorned versions of songs from his five-decade career, every emotion – from howling rage to whispered heartbreak – is radiantly captured.
The production is minimalist: just Cave with his piano, Colin Greenwood with his bass. A spotlight illuminates their figures in such a way as to emphasise the negative space around them. Now and then, it dwindles down and is snuffed out completely, leaving Cave’s voice alone and searching in the darkness.
Early in the evening, the crowd’s energy is deadened by the weight of the venue – it’s all a bit too respectful. Cave prompts the audience to loosen up: he does a little banter, a little audience participation. By the time the encore comes around, everyone is a little too comfortable and the final stretch of the evening feels slightly derailed by Cave fielding and rejecting song requests.
Nick Cave performs at the Palais in November 2022.Credit: Richard Clifford
More problematic is the issue of the mix: for all the Plenary’s tech, Greenwood’s bass is almost imperceptible throughout the entire show. It seems a shame to have an artist of his calibre on the tour and for the audience not to be able to hear him.
Despite these stutters, the two musicians deliver a masterful performance. Playing this kind of stripped-back show comes with certain constraints – many Bad Seed songs simply don’t translate, leaving the available repertoire necessarily narrow. This is not a bad thing. It offers a glimpse of Cave at his most essential.
Still, there is good news for those who might have wanted a little more chaos. With a new album to be released in August, Cave promises to be back next year – and this time, it will be with the Bad Seeds.Reviewed by Nadia Bailey
THEATREA Midsummer Night’s Dream ★★★★Bell Shakespeare, Arts Centre Melbourne, until May 11
For this critic, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has never yet turned into a nightmare. Shakespeare’s magical spree into fairyland, with its scheming sprites and romantic mayhem, is one of those seemingly indestructible plays that leaves me feeling lighter about the world – and the latest Bell Shakespeare production, though it takes a while to get airborne, does lend the audience wings in the end.
Matu Ngaropo makes a lovably ridiculous Bottom.Credit: Brett Boardman
Curiously, it isn’t fairies or bizarre love rectangles that typically steal the show. That honour belongs to the mechanicals, who brought lashings of hilarity to Peter Evans’ remarkable production of The Dream a decade ago (with Richard Piper as Bottom), and they prove an inexhaustible source of mirth this time, too.
It’s a stroke of genius, the meta-theatrical subplot with tradies rehearsing and performing “the lamentable comedy” of Pyramus and Thisbe. Good actors have a lot of fun throwing themselves into the antics; the spirit of amateurism functions almost as Cupid’s twin in the play.
An amateur, as the word’s etymology suggests, is as mad a lover as any of the romantic leads, and Matu Ngaropo makes a lovably ridiculous Bottom. His camp skewering of the enthusiasm and ego of a weaver who’s a superstar in his own mind is laugh-out-loud funny and sports the lack of self-awareness, and unhinged exhibitionist streak, of an Elizabethan reality TV show.
Ella Prince, Imogen Sage and Richard Pyros in a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.Credit: Brett Boardman
The fairies are more otherworldly and unknowably fey than usual – less quick bright things than eerie, gothic, eldritch creatures, reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics.
Ella Prince’s ethereal, white-haired Puck, Richard Pyros’ obsessively deranged Oberon, and Imogen Sage’s imperious Titania open the gates to their fairy glen through heightened physical theatre and strange mannerism, lending an inhuman dimension to their intrigues.
It’s a nice contrast to the all-too-human frailties of the four lovers ensnared in their web, and although the romantic entanglements are a little flat-footed at first, they rise into nimble comic chaos as the misfired fairy spell takes effect.
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Tightly choreographed hilarity fuels the ensuing love battle, with Helena (Isabel Burton) and Hermia (Ahunim Abebe) getting their claws out, and Lysander (Laurence Young) and Demetrius (Mike Howlett) having pissing contests over them. What struck me forcefully about the performances is that the lovers are so young and passionate they seem to hate anything they don’t love – an extremity tamed only when the patriarchal boot is removed from their throats.
The gender politics behind A Midsummer Night’s Dream remain problematic, of course, and this production leaves them emphatically intact for the characters and the audience to chafe against. It’s a fitting frame of darkness for a production that leaps and glimmers like a will-o’-the-wisp, and is performed to a high standard.Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
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