
It was a devoted crowd that packed into the Recital Centre to watch An Evening With Billy Bragg, presented as part of the 2012 Melbourne Festival.


They call it an opera but it's not that, really. There's no story, no definable songs. It is more a surrealist soundscape, so unique in construction it's almost its own form.

The clever use of repetition in Weather lulls you into a summer-like trance that can be suddenly broken when the set erupts around the dancers, or when the dancers themselves change pace with such velocity you're catapulted into an entirely different mood.

Cristabel Sved and Kate Box's new version of August Strindberg's classic play Miss Julie is a good play but not a great one.

It would be easy to let this production slip into caricature and melodrama, but director Lee Lewis has very capably left it teetering just on the edge. It's not at all an indulgent production: nothing about it feels laboured.

It's hard to fault a show that makes an audience cry with laughter, become wide-eyed with wonder and scream with delight all at the same time.