Anthem

Australia’s festering wounds are given air in this moving state-of-the-nation play coming to Sydney Festival

TWO DECADES AFTER they collaborated on the landmark play Who’s Afraid of the Working Class, the Australian theatre dream team of writers Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, Christos Tsiolkas and composer Irine Vela are back together again. The opportunity presented by Anthem – to collectively grapple with what this country is, and the conflicts that lie at its core – proved too promising to resist. The resulting work is a frequently arresting, big-thinking portrait of a nation at war with itself, where wounds fester rather than heal, and conflict begets conflict. It’s set mostly on Melbourne trains and weaves together different narratives from the four playwrights in ways that are gripping and intoxicating. It’s an anthology of sorts, curated by the writers and director Susie Dee into a mostly cogent but sprawling night of theatre.

Things kick off with a scene by Tsiolkas in which a young Australian man (Thuso Lekwape) and an English woman (Eryn Jean Norvill) find themselves stuck on the Eurostar, travelling back to London. Their journey has been disrupted by prorefugee protesters, and a conversation occurs between the woman and the man. It’s not the sort of conversation you’d expect to hear between a black man and an educated young white woman exploring the intersection of class and race. The stage starts filling with commuters during rush hour in Bovell’s chapter, in which we hear unspoken thoughts and truths coming to life like a choral work, as individuals jostle for literal and figurative space. Reeves offers a very funny Bonnie and Clydeesque tale of two underpaid retail workers (Sahil Saluja and Eryn Jean Norvill) who decide to demand what’s rightfully theirs. Cornelius has a finely wrought tale of a white woman (Maude Davey) and her former maid (Amanda Ma) who meet on a train and discover a sudden shift in their power dynamic. But the most affecting scene is of a young mother struggling to keep her life together. When a public transport officer shows up, an exchange occurs that’s heart-stopping for exactly what it says about the compromised and dangerous positions our politics force individuals into. Ben Neutzeà Roslyn Packer Theatre, 22 Hickson Rd, Walsh Bay 2000. 02 8880 9214. sydneyfestival.org.au. $50-$79. Jan 15-19.