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Opera House Concert Hall, November 6
If a side stage to heaven was created after Bob Dylan met the Pope earlier this week, Courtney Barnett could play there next, after this first gig since 2018 in her childhood home town.
No frills, no theatrics, no interval and no openers: what Barnett, her drummer and her bassist bring are two seamless hours of chemical-grade, phenomenal indie-rock goodness, each of them casually all-in.
Unlike a lot of shows with audiences of this size, the music isn’t a kind of performative pummelling or acoustic assault; it’s an easygoing invitation, like an open door to an artist’s share house. When Barnett breaks out a guitar solo during Hopefulessness it’s almost a revelation to hear it well-crafted instead of showily virtuosic.
Another rare thing at a live event: you hear every lyric, delivered through the singer’s nonchalant conversation style. You’re unfailingly glad to hear every lyric, too, especially when they’re this good: “I take a hit from an asthma puffer/I do it wrong/I was never good at smoking bongs”.
Barnett, dressed in white T-shirt and slacks and with that signature mullet of thick curls, plays her electric with total punk ease, having fun on the whammy bar, unfazed by her own grungy, scrappy alchemy.
Alongside a few best-loveds from the back catalogue – from 2014’s breakout Avant Gardener (storytelling at its finest) to History Eraser (“I stayed drunk and fell awake”) to Pedestrian at Best (the stalls-shaking closer) – the show rinses out this year’s Creature of Habit album.
While it’s not so rich in idiosyncratic images and quotidian storylines, the release continues to build on the deadpan, astutely observed, ennui-soaked existentialism that the singer-songwriter has patented. As she talk-sings on Sugar Plum : “You’re either drowning in the deepest sea/Or drowning in the kitchen sink”.
These are songs for reckoning with serial shortcomings and coulda-beens, and for trying to hold true to the simple good things of every day.
Sun-baked, droll and wistful, the show summons a slacker’s golden grace. When Barnett has the whole place up and singing to 2015’s Depreston (“If you’ve got a spare half a million/You could knock it down and start rebuilding”), she becomes Sydney’s crown Millennial of wit and despondent dreams.
Ensemble Theatre, November 4, until November 21
The older generation has despaired about the younger generation since we lived in caves – and the feeling’s mutual. It’s the snideness of intergenerational antagonism that British playwright Mike Bartlett zeroes in on in his 2018 play Snowflake . It’s not enough to revile each other: we seem to need to hurt each other, too.
When we meet 48-year-old Andy, James Lugton plays him with the haunted look of a hunted animal. His wife died six years before; his daughter, Maya, disappeared without explanation three years later, announcing her departure by text. He sent 47 unanswered ones back.
Andy, who lives in Oxford, hears that Maya’s been spotted in a café there, so leaves a new message suggesting they meet in a church hall. Neutral ground. It’s Christmas Eve, and he is even wearing his woolly jumper with the reindeer on it because he figures no one can be cross with him in that – which shows his slender grasp of the situation.
