The Hive

The Hive
Sam Sejavka
Chamber Made at The Meat Market
Until 10 Sept

There’s something about Sam that all the quirky Melbourne theatre writers owe a debt to. The excentric or fried, Lally Katz, Dario Va Circa, James Adler, and yes even me too. Wether we know it or not, we’re the heirs of his playwrite as rock star cool.

I tell you that because I want you to understand that the problem I had with The Hive wasn’t the writing.

After all, I could barely understand a damn thing that was being said. Sung.

I wanted to like this show, I really did. It’s a modern opera by chamber made, it’s reinterpretation of a classic Sam Sejavka script, I should have left that place with my brain buzzing.

Let’s get right into what I hated shall we?

Up and coming genius composer Nicolas Vines. Stop telling this kid he’s a genius. It’s not doing him any good. He’s clearly talented but the more you tell him he’s brilliant the more he’ll think he can get away with anything.

I get modern composition, I really do. Atonality and dissoncance, I love it. But I also get balance and contrast. The score for The Hive is all dissonance all the time. And after half an hour of it, the rest’s just white noise. We want a god damn melody. Once. Just once.

Even Stravinsky can’t be Stravinsky all the god damn time.

Anna Tregloan’s design is pretty if not really exploring an idea very deeply, but who can blame her, is there nothing in this town that she doesn’t do the design for at the moment?

I can’t realty comment on the direction because I didn’t notice any and as I say, the delivery of the text meant I didn’t understand a single word so I can’t really review the play. The original text however is probably still available from currency and is well worth a read.

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