Source : the age
MUSIC
Floodlights ★★★
The Forum, May 24
Smoke, an immense cage of light, an eager rush onto one of Melbourne’s most storied stages, and a hometown heroes’ welcome that swells the room. Floodlights’ night is a triumph already. Alive (I Want To Feel) is heralded by the lone trumpet of Sarah Hellyer: the bugler in the face of a gathering storm. And alive we feel.
Melbourne rock band Floodlights at the Forum on Saturday night.Credit: Martin Philbey
Floodlights are no pop band; no hits or Hottest 100 contenders, though their second album, Painting of My Time, was shortlisted for the 2023 Australian Music Prize. What tonight’s packed room reflects is more unusual: a serious following for serious music, with a gritty, localised aesthetic that more tenderly echoes Midnight Oil, The Triffids, Goanna – bands that tried to make sense of a country and its shadows.
Tonight’s set leans hard on Underneath, the new album that continues the collective’s earnest search for meaning in a more inward direction. It’s less postcard-accessible than Small Town Pub and Nullarbor — older tunes that reliably lift the energy when long intros and murmured set-ups lead attention to drift. The new material is thematically dense, deliberate, sometimes elusive.
But JOY is pure high. Horses Will Run creeps and surges with dream-state drama. Frontman Louis Parsons doesn’t so much sing as declaim. He’s insistent, on edge, but rarely quite decipherable in the wiry ensemble attack. Hellyer’s heroic trumpet and wailing blues harp are recurring motifs, adding flashes of texture and tension that hark back to Aussie pub rock forebears.
Louis Parsons, lead singer and guitarist for Melbourne rock band Floodlights, performs on stage at the Forum on May 24, 2025Credit: Martin Philbey
Mid-show, the piano-led Melancholy Cave wants to pull the room into a hush, but the crowd seems elsewhere. There’s a nagging sense that much of Underneath hasn’t quite landed yet—at least not live.
But Buoyant is a late-set victory. As promised by the title, the room levitates. The crowd picks up the booming hook and sways into a proper old-school beer barn moment. And the sprawling 5AM is an epic set closer of slow-building, stadium-targeted proportions.
“It’s been an emotional day for us,” Parsons offers gratefully before the single-song encore. Golden oldie Painting of My Time is the climax the night needs and again, the room rises to meet its all-in chanting refrain. It’s late, but a moment of exhilarated arrival that makes the journey worthwhile. Floodlights don’t always hit their mark. But there’s no question they know what they’re aiming for.
Reviewed by Michael Dwyer
THEATRE
Endgames ★★★
fortyfivedownstairs, until June 1
Three brief encounters with hideous men achieve a sense of twilit tragicomedy in the hands of the legendary Max Gillies.
The legendary Max Gillies stars in Endgames at fortyfivedownstairs.Credit: Jodie Hutchinson
With Endgames, Gillies rejoins director Laurence Strangio to present what’s in some ways a companion piece to their 2018 production of Krapp’s Last Tape – this time uniting the late Beckett work Eh Joe with an excerpt from Jack Hibberd’s classic monodrama A Stretch of the Imagination and Chekhov’s shambolic lecture On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco.
Although Hibberd died last year, the curtain may long continue to fall on his immortal stage creation, Monk O’Neill. The misanthropic hermit in Stretch remains an incarnation of Australian male destructiveness and despair as appalling as he is compelling.
Hibberd used this character to diagnose cultural disease – from slashing misogyny to the rapacity and bad faith of colonialism – with a clear-eyed honesty that reshaped what was possible on our stages, and this excerpt includes Monk’s final will and testament, in which he gives:
‘all my lands and property, goods and chattels, to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia … On no account must my domain fall into the clutches of the predatory and upstart albino. I believe that the tides of history will swamp and wash aside this small pink tribe of mistletoe men, like insects …Change insects to dead leaves…’
One Tree Hill isn’t his to give, of course, and even Monk’s presence is erased in this version, largely an audio performance under crepuscular lighting.
With Endgames, Gillies rejoins director Laurence Strangio.Credit: Jodie Hutchinson
Gillies only appears once, rifle in hand, pursuing “an emu on heat” through the shadows; the brilliantly produced soundscape, however, overfills the physical absence – not least in the copious, and comically loud, urination which bookends the piece.
If that whets the appetite for a proper remount of Stretch, the audio monologue in Eh Joe is part of Beckett’s creative intention. The elderly loner here sits entombed in silence on a couch, as the accusatory voice of a woman (Jillian Murray) torments him with memory and regret.
As he seduced women in his life, so this internal voice now seduces him towards death, and Gillies’ wordless performance haunts with barely perceptible pain and confusion, with the agony of futile presence.
Gillies has always had a talent for clowning, and in the Chekhov, he leans into a more overtly satirical sort of existential monologue. Nyukhin is a nervy, ineffectual public speaker. The man is supposed to be giving a charity lecture on the evils of tobacco, but it keeps turning into a digressive complaint about his wife and daughters, whom he fears.
The actor fumbles his lines more than a few times, which matters less than it might when he’s playing a character who wishes he could erase his memory, and whose comical lack of authority is his defining feature.
Elegant visual design replicates the mysterious alchemy of language that ghosts these figures as they circle through worlds extinguished, or perhaps never lit.
Reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
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