Ensemble Theatre, November 4
7/10
Barbara knows that one of the dumbest things governments have done is fail to champion music education. Making music improves our intellects, emotional acumen, general well-being and social cohesion. It’s also fun. That’s why Barbara formed a choir in rural Australia, and when that unravelled, formed another.
Barbara (Valerie Bader) is an energetic bundle of contradictions: a psychologist and ageing hippy whos never lost her drive to make things happen. She’s treasured by her chums for this, and because she extracts the best from everyone. She is soft-hearted, yet harbours political ambitions, and is wise in a community where wisdom is not the chief commodity.
The late Aidan Fennessy’s play, which sadly premiered in Melbourne after he had died, is peopled with big characters who define themselves inside a speech or two. There’s Totty (Georgina Symes), who’s rich enough to buy her own plane, and whose bossiness can be forgiven, even if her inedible muffins can’t, because she’s generous and occasionally hilariously funny. To be successful in country politics, she explains to Barbara, “you just need to be fluent in ‘boofhead’.”
Aseni (Nancy Denis) is a recent arrival from Zimbabwe, where she was a doctor. Here she works in a deli while awaiting the official okay to practice, is heavily pregnant and exudes good-humoured resilience.
Carita Farrer Spencer plays Mack (christened Marianne), who uses her blue-tinged vocabulary with ample loquacity for two. This perhaps is why her 23-year-old daughter, Savannah (Tyallah Bullock), is mostly non-verbal, instead whispering in the ear of Barbara or her mother, including coming up the new name, The Heartbreak Choir.
The heartbreak in question refers to a member’s suicide, which caused a schism in the original choir. The dead woman’s husband, Peter (Jay Laga’aia) is the town’s senior constable, and he’s just clinging on. His son, Beau (Jasper Lee-Lindsay) has withdrawn into his headphones and bouncing a basketball.
Ably directed by Anna Ledwich, Fennessy’s warm-hearted comedy only comes unstuck because he tried to make it two plays in one, introducing an intensity of drama at odds with the prevailing tone, as when someone sings sharp in a four-part harmony. The suicide of Peter’s wife, her backstory and its consequences for the choir and the town make the play feel like it’s been pressure-cooked, rather than allowed to unfold on its own terms, when the dramas would have been smaller, and you’d have continued to sit there smiling quietly at the whimsy.
As it is, the imposed tumult seems to overwhelm the play, rather like a flood occurring somewhere that wasn’t previously considered flood-prone. Emotions that were shrewdly nuanced in the comedy can become overblown in the drama, and not through the fault of anyone’s performances, with those of Denis and Bullock being especially strong.
The main performative flaw is a vocal one. Bullock is beautifully cast as the reticent Savannah, having a luminescence that’s the opposite of her mother’s genial offensiveness. She’s also supposed to be conservatorium-bound with an angelic voice that elevates the ensemble sound. But Bullock actually has a more modest voice than some of the others, undermining Fennessy’s divine plan that her singing would be the counterpoint to her social muteness.
Otherwise the songs they sing work well under Sally Whitwell’s direction. Designer Nick Fry gives us a community hall with parquet flooring and a crooked picture of the queen, and the finale’s surprise is big enough to paper over the glibness of the resolution of the plot line’s dramatic strand.
Until January 12.