Reviews

Competitive Tenderness (1996) is the mouthful of a title of a very wordy satire about the wheeling and double-dealing of a typically Australian rural, local government council. It appears Greater Bourke has been sold up the river by a CEO who rather inconveniently then passed away, leaving a clueless Mayor, his conniving peers and opportunistic staff to pick up the pieces. Enter brand new CEO, Dawn Snow – who has been lured to the town to be the new broom of sweeping reform but she soon proves to be more of a perfumed steamroller.

Having seen the previous Met production of Eugene Onegin with the great Renee Fleming, I was interested to encounter this new production, opening the current Met season, with the current Met star, the Russian soprano, Anna Netrebko. I was not disappointed.

Netrebko has a little more steel in her voice, but it is still beautiful and so relaxed. She has great presence on stage and moved easily from the naivety of the young girl to the confidence of the grown woman. She worked well with the mezzo Oksana Volkova as her younger sister.

From the moment you enter the Lennox Theatre at Riverside, we see three dancers in warm-up gear stretching. They are in their second home – the stage. A sense of familiarity is present. We’ve seen this scene before. But what’s to come is something new, something fresh and exciting in the dance world. 

The droll humour of broadcaster John Doyle, his sharp wit, erudition and compassion, are all there in this his second play, a black comedy which, indeed, occasionally struggles under so many guises.

At the heart is Paul Blackwell, so engaging and unmannered as the 62-year-old physicist Vere, who is told at the start that within a month dementia will crumble his best asset. Doyle’s tender empathy to Vere’s impending voyage was so obviously informed by watching his own Dad go through the same rapid mental decline.