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Updated April 8, 2026 — 12:33pm,first published April 5, 2026 — 11:59am
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Key pointsDANCE: The first-ever collaboration between Bangarra Dance Theatre and the Australian Ballet does not disappoint. MUSIC: Even without their late frontman MacGowan, The Pogues deliver a night to remember. THEATRE: Till The Stars Come Down hilariously interweaves the lives of ordinary people with class, family, politics, immigration and climate change. MUSIC: Ensemble Apex gave a program of dedicated concentration, which made thoughtful connections across countries and generations.DANCE
Flora
Sydney Opera House, April 7
Until April 18
Reviewed by CHANTAL NGUYEN
★★★★
Flora is a significant moment in Australian arts: the first full-length collaboration between Bangarra Dance Theatre and the Australian Ballet.
Frontlining as choreographer is Bangarra’s artistic director and co-CEO Frances Rings, with a creative team that reads like a who’s who of Australian artists.
The outstanding, cinematic score is by William Barton, the yidaki (didgeridoo) virtuoso, who was last year immortalised in an Archibald-winning portrait.
Grasses swirl on stage in one section. Sitthixay DitthavongThe dancers are dressed in expressive, luxe costumes by Grace Lillian Lee – the Indigenous designer of the year known for her Jean Paul Gaultier collaborations - with beloved Bangarra collaborator Jennifer Irwin.
And the sets and lighting, evocative of vast Australian landscapes, are by rising stars Elizabeth Gadsby and Karen Norris.
This collaborative vision, rooted in the country’s extraordinary natural environment, furthers a truly Australian artistic identity. And isn’t that, after all, one of the driving purposes of a national arts scene? For this alone, Flora deserves applause.
After interval, the emphasis shifts to colonisation and its effect on the flora of the continent.Kate LongleyFlora explores Australian identity and history through 12 eye-catching vignettes of native plant-life. Its best moments are like visual poems, rich in Bangarra’s unique lyricism.
In the opening scenes, a network of roots descends from above, the dancers suspended upside down to represent clumps of sleeping yams, limbs cracking open in a tangle of clay-encrusted hands and feet. Then grasses swirl on stage, with dancers as dusty yellow spinifex crying “tch tch, haaaaah!”
Colonisation is explored through a distinctive portrayal of Sir Joseph Banks’ plant collection: the dancers stand trapped inside specimen bags, bright petals pressed against stark white netting and flickering fluorescents.
The piece closes with an unusually meditative finale, featuring the female ensemble glowingly costumed against a black backdrop, their bright silhouettes capturing the eye-catching architecture of Australian flowers.
The burning landscape is powerfully represented.Kate LongleyAs with most full-length works, Flora has weaknesses. The Act 1 treatment of colonisation is gauche, underestimating audiences and compromising its own message with a dancer in a too-obvious Union Jack-emblazoned red coat.
Similarly, I preferred the depiction of hoofed animals in Bangarra’s 2018 Dark Emu. But on the whole, the dancing and choreography is striking, with the 35-strong ensemble clearly inspired by the cross-company collaboration.
Keep an eye out for Jill Ogai’s grief-stricken solo as the golden wattle, and standout performances from Courtney Radford, Elijah Trevitt, Daniel Mateo, and Edan Porter. Principal artist Callum Linnane’s searing intensity is – as always – a highpoint, with Flora one of the last chances to see him before he departs for Hamburg Ballet.
MUSIC
THE POGUES
Sydney Opera House, April 5
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★★★★
There are some bands you thank your godforsaken stars to experience live, and bejesus – even without their legendary frontman – The Pogues are one of them.
The ashes of Shane MacGowan, that curse-rattled bard with the tombstone teeth, were scattered on the River Shannon three years gone, but his “rapscallion, angry, weeping passed-out songs” (to quote Tom Waits) and whiskey-soaked spirit howled like a banshee through the Concert Hall on Easter Sunday, turning its docile crowd by the end into a hot-blooded rabble.
We were here to honour the late singer-songwriter, and 40 years of the Celtic punk-rockers’ break-out album, Rum Sodomy & the Lash.
Founding members James Fearnley, Jem Finer and Spider Stacey led the charge, with more than a dozen instruments behind them. There was a brass section, a drum the size of a baby rhino pounded by the Bad Seeds drummer, Stacey’s tin whistle, Fearnley’s “gristle whistle”, guitars, a harp, a banjo, a hurdy-gurdy and more, plus four guest vocalists.
Such a carousing motley was created, it seemed a shame that more drinks weren’t being spilled, bodies lurching or heads knocked together (as per their heyday). That feral live atmosphere and multi-instrumental grind-up you just can’t recreate on any recording, especially not a studio album – not even one as grand as Elvis Costello’s production of Rum.
Lisa O’Neill and Iona Zajac – and Stacey of course – did a bang-on job filling their lungs with the songs MacGowan would have sung. O’Neill, with an almost unearthly plangent voice, got the pride of Dirty Old Town (that popular Pogues cover of 1949 ode); Zajac could get the souls out of purgatory with her caterwaul as a “wild cat of Kilkenny” and her rendition of Poor Paddy.
These fair lasses chased each other around the stage, with other hijinks thrown in as the band got ever more roguish and loose.
The songs on Rum – five written by MacGowan, others traditional – are myth-makers to mighty degenerates, working class anthems, and ballads of lost causes and black-sooted realism. Many speak to disillusion and dissolution in the Irish emigrant experience. A London band they may be, but it’s thanks largely to The Pogues that Irish roots music made its way to modern ears, and to the Opera House.
There was the “cheap theatrics” (Stacey gave a disgusted eye-roll) of the obligatory encore. Then there was a second, bona fide encore. The crowd hollered bloody murder for both.
THEATRE
Till The Stars Come Down
KXT on Broadway, Ultimo
April 1, until April 11
Reviewed by JOYCE MORGAN
★★★★½
Three sisters gather for the wedding of the youngest. Add a potty-mouth aunt, awkward speeches and a wardrobe malfunction, then marinate in vodka.
The set-up feels familiar, but what takes it far beyond the predictable is how it hilariously – yet gently – interweaves the lives of ordinary people with the fault lines of class, family, politics, immigration and climate change. And all without a whiff of didacticism.
This vivid production is filled with flesh-and-blood characters. Braiden TokoA drama centred around three sisters inevitably evokes Chekhov’s Three Sisters. But this isn’t a trio of sophisticated landed gentry living in languid, provincial isolation, but three passionate working-class white women living in a hollowed-out former mining town in England’s east Midlands.
There, they laugh, dance, fight, get drunk, get horny, tear each other apart and dance some more. The title is from a line in W.H. Auden’s poem Death’s Echo.
It’s raucous, messy and brilliantly crafted by British playwright Beth Steel.
Steel has drawn on the down-at-heel region where she grew up, the daughter of a miner. Her hometown was hit by pit closures in the mid-1980s and voted overwhelmingly for Brexit a decade ago.
Yet all this bubbles in the background. As this 2024 play opens amid hair rollers, hairspray and mugs of tea, bride-to-be Sylvia (Imogen Sage) is being readied with help from siblings Hazel (Ainslie McGlynn) and Maggie (Jane Angharad).
Sylvia is getting hitched to a once-penniless now successful Polish immigrant Marek (Zoran Jevtic).
Hazel quips: “Polish … that’s not a language, that’s a Wi-Fi password. It’s just Zs and Ws.” Her casual racism soon becomes more overt.
The first act of this ensemble piece introduces the sisters and their fabulously salty Aunty Carol (Jo Briant).
The men are a far cry from the self-made Marek. The sisters’ father Tony (Peter Eyers), his estranged brother Pete (Brendan Miles), and Hazel’s husband John (James Smithers) are all on the scrap heap.
Some hold tenaciously to the past. Instead of a toast to the newlyweds, Pete recites the names of long-closed pits like an incantation of the dead.
Hazel’s growing resentment is targeted at the immigrants she blames for taking jobs.
While the play’s setting is as specific as the accents (which were inclined to slip around), the problems besetting this family are not. A community where jobs have vanished and resentment of immigrants festers – we could be in Hanson-land.
Sharply directed by Anthony Skuse, the production has strong performances from its central women. As bride Sylvia, Sage belatedly stands up to McGlynn’s bigoted, bitter Hazel. Angharad is outstanding as conflicted Maggie, the sister with four marriages behind her.
With the lion’s share of one-liners, Briant’s Aunty Carol times astutely her blend of witty and shrewd observations.
Jevtic’s Marek made the most of his underwritten role. Peter Eyers’ Tony displayed great tenderness in his affecting scene with his granddaughter.
Part soap-opera, part tragedy, this vivid production is filled with flesh-and-blood characters comically, painfully struggling for a future in a rapidly changing world.
MUSIC
Behind me is the dark
Ensemble Apex
ACO On The Pier, April 1
Reviewed by PETER McCALLUM
★★★★
Gyorgy Ligeti’s music became famous through the ethereal, weightless sections in the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968). Listeners who had scratched their heads at atonal music without melody or toe-tappable rhythm when heard in the concert hall, now suddenly got it when experienced against the cold of interstellar space.
That was two years before his Chamber Concerto (1970), which was the culmination of innovations he had developed during the 1960s after fleeing Hungary and encountering European modernism. As the final work in Ensemble Apex’s concert of varied and intriguing sonoristic soundscapes under conductor Sam Weller, it was, in some respects, both culmination and progenitor.
Dedication concentration: Ensemble Apex with conductor Sam Weller.Gabrielle MurrayShivers on Speed by German-Austrian composer Brigitta Muntendorf dealt with unpredictable fragmented impulses and quivering repetitions across an ensemble of six instruments, alternating between hesitant murmurs and splintering thuds that at times became frightening and frenetic.
By contrast, Januaries, by Australian-born, UK-based Lisa Illean, explored sun-drenched sounds that were dry, intense and spare. Evoking memories of childhood summers in Queensland, it began with an undulating quiet wailing figure, and kept sentiment and sweetness at a distance to create a sense of presence enlivened by glistening moments.
Hrim by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir struck a different tone, beginning with softly howling woodwind and misty stirring tremelos. Passages of sustained high and low notes produced a sense of depth and dark colour interrupted by sudden loud sounds and fading wispiness.
Ligeti’s Chamber Concerto began with curdled textures on woodwind, quickly thickening to rustling sounds on strings. There is a brief outbreak of emphatic unison melody which vanishes as quickly as it emerged. The second movement dwelled on more sustained sounds, introducing warmth from the brass and chords with prominent octaves which evoked quiet stasis. The third movement, impressively controlled by Weller and the ensemble, explored Ligeti’s fascination with mechanical ticking textures (famously exploited in Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes).
In the last movement, some of Ligeti’s spirit and humour erupts briefly as members of the ensemble broke through with brief cadenzas, which darted exuberantly liked unleashed dogs. The movement ended with a wry sideways glance.
It was a program of dedicated concentration from Ensemble Apex, which made thoughtful connections across countries and generations, as though the promises of the postwar avant garde were being finally redeemed by the promising composers of our own time.
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Joyce Morgan is a theatre critic for The Sydney Morning Herald. She is a former arts editor and writer of the SMH and also an author.Connect via X.