Our critics run their eye over some of the shows opening this week.

THE CARETAKER
Ensemble Theatre, October 19
Until November 19
★★★★½

Don’t miss this. The gaping holes of what is left unsaid make Harold Pinter’s dialogue so edgy as to demand a particular virtuosity from the actors. They must lift it into its own theatrical reality, or it can be trapped in the doldrums of stiltedness. Anthony Gooley, Henry Nixon and especially Darren Gilshenan have that virtuosity by the bucketful, the latter offering one of the year’s great performances as Davies.

The cast brings virtuosity by the bucketful to Pinter’s work.Credit:Prudence Upton

Davies is a tramp who’s taken in and given a bed by Aston (Gooley), and then must puzzle out the power relationship between Aston and his brother Mick (Nixon). These relationships are slowly shifting tectonic plates beneath Davies’ shoeless feet, lubricated with humour that itself keeps swinging from a Spike Milligan-like zaniness to much darker comedy.

If Beckett’s Waiting for Godot showed how little needed to happen on a stage to make a play, The Caretaker (which premiered seven years later in 1960) shows how little needs to happen to fashion a thriller. Okay, it may not be a thriller in the Hollywood sense, but the tension is thick enough to slice with a penknife, as Davies seeks a foothold in the brothers’ world, and as Mick loads the play with menace, and then rather than pulling the trigger, showers the bewildered Davies with broadsides of comedy. The gentle Aston, meanwhile, builds his own tension as we await explanation for his passivity.

Director Iain Sinclair says he’s had a lifelong desire to do this play justice, and he’s cast it close to perfection. Gilshenan delivers a fractured Davies who’s in a constant flux between cockiness and fear, aggression and fawning, and whose body contorts with these transitions. Mick correctly assesses Davies as a rogue, but Gilshenan ensures we also feel the pathos of his predicament in an affectingly complete vocal and physical performance.

In Davies and Mick, Pinter gives us two characters with ostensibly rather more reason to be institutionalised than Aston – although we can’t know how Aston used to be. All three have their own holy grail. Davies has to go to Sidcup to get the papers that prove his identity, yet he can never take the first step on that trip, as if his identity might not exist.

Aston dreams of building a shed in the yard, but gets no closer than accruing timber, and, in a brilliant scene, relentlessly sanding a piece of wood, the rasping sound creating a rhythm as he recounts – to himself rather than Davies – the horrors of shock treatment. Mick’s dream – to do up the run-down house, with tastefully muted multicoloured lino, tweed upholstery and tiles in the kitchen – seems just as far over the horizon.

Gooley’s performance is as muted as that putative lino, any anger in his character having been electrocuted. His quiet understatement develops its own potency, however, as does his physical presence, and these become vital counterpoints to Davies and Mick. Nixon’s Mick is fantastically manic and convincingly dangerous. He gives us a level of unpredictability that makes him the fizzing fuse to Davies’ bomb, and his voice modulation is exceptional.

Veronique Benett’s set is essentially true to Pinter’s instructions, although less cluttered and messy than might have been expected. The bucket that hangs from the ceiling to collect the drips is marvellously ominous, like a sword of Damocles poised to thwart their various fantasies, and the whole production casts a spell you don’t want broken, so two intervals seem at least one too many.
-John Shand

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Godspell
Hayes Theatre Company
October 19
Until November 6
★★★★

We’re in a grotty pub, the kind where the walls get sticky and the jukebox needs a good whack to get it going. A man arrives, gets himself a drink, sits down at the piano. Begins to play. The tune starts as a threadbare whisper but builds in strength as a rag tag band of characters appears to join the ensemble. Is this where it all begins?

Equal parts chaotic and revelatory, Stephen Schwartz’s 1971 musical (with words and book by John-Michael Tebelak) turns the Gospel of St Matthew into an anarchic review. Jesus (played here by the luminous Billie Palin) uses song, story and dance to bring people together and teach them how to live. Then, as the story plays out, as we all know it must, the community is empowered to take her message of radical love to the world.

Director Richard Carroll and music director Victoria Falconer have brought together their own rag tag band to create a wildly entertaining and, ultimately, moving spectacle. It’s simultaneously nostalgic and knowing, longing and seeking.

Everyone one stage has a dizzying repertoire of talents.Credit:Philip Erbacher

The costumes, by Angela White, are gloriously retro. The set (Emma White) is instantly evocative. The voices are Australian, the backchat is contemporary. And, as it turns out, giving the word of God the cabaret treatment is a stroke of genius, whether it’s a puppet version of the Good Samaritan or the story of the Prodigal Son told through interpretative dance.

None of this would be possible without an extraordinary ensemble. Everyone on stage, it seems, has a dizzying repertoire of talents, from conjuring to pole-dancing, to mastery of more than 40 different instruments, from recorder to musical saw. The music is curated knowingly, lovingly, and from centre-stage, by Falconer and the choreography, by Sally Dashwood, is unselfconsciously playful.

In The Monthly this September Alison Croggon, in her piece celebrating the achievements of Melbourne’s Back to Back Theatre, writes about the real, hard work of theatre-making: “every collaboration is a rehearsal for utopia… a gamble on human possibility.” This show and this production embody that sentiment.

Earlier this week the Hayes Theatre Company announced a new creative leadership model, naming Hayes founding member Richard Carroll and composer, performer and multi-instrumentalist Victoria Falconer as co-artistic directors.

Godspell feels like their manifesto.
– Harriet Cunnigham

FOLLIES OF GOD
Carriageworks, October 20
Until October 23
★★★½

Raghav Handa is a thoughtful, creative artist and an elegant, engaging mover. His Indian-Australian background adds depth and breadth to the dance theatre pieces he makes.

Here it is the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita that is his starting point. It was, apparently, an inspiration for both Adolf Hitler and Mahatma Gandhi. A short written introduction declares Handa is aiming to explore its complexities, the use of language to exercise power and “the seduction of violence”.

Raghav Handa is a thoughtful, creative artist and an elegant, engaging mover.Credit:Zan Wimberley

Follies of God, one of two featured works on the opening night of the 10-day Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, is dominated by war. From distant rumblings to gunshot explosions, we hear a soundtrack to horror all too familiar from the conflict in Ukraine.

An empty stage is dominated by a giant tyre (from a warplane perhaps?) on which Handa sits, stands, dives and rolls about. Using it as a platform, he delivers an opening tirade with phrases like “You will die for me” and “Peace is not the answer”.

But mostly he plays a lone figure in white overalls, a man driven mad by war. It turns him into a shaking wreck, a soldier frightened by a barking dog.

For a moment it seems as though the tide is turning when a gentle sound of social dance music replaces the bursts of martial bands. But after a brief encounter with an invisible dance partner, this war-maker turns back to the giant tyre and vents his sexual urges with graphic urgency.

So where does peace come into the picture? The only quiet moments are when the soldier is wounded – and then he returns to the battlefield. It is a depressing statement about war, maybe short of its ambitious aims. But it is well crafted, powerfully performed – and not for the faint-hearted.
-Jill Sykes

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