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Sydney Opera House - Wed Jan 25
Any musical artist would struggle to raise expectations higher than Washington has with her Insomnia show. Facts first: the show is one of the top billed of the Sydney Festival, it has sold out the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, it’s also one of only four performances – first in Sydney, then Paris, London, New York. Furthermore, the Insomnia album came in the wake of, or in response to, a reportedly emotionally overwhelming year for Megan Washington, in which her debut album I Believe You Liar sold platinum and garnered a swag of awards; Insomnia’s songs are the kind that pin you to the wall with honesty, they bristle with the kind of skinned-shins rawness, and in part the four-performances-only aspect of the Insomnia work is allegedly owed to the musician’s reluctance to revisit the emotion of some songs. Then there the show’s description as a “conceptual work [which] incorporates art, poetry, photography and designs” presented in four movements: Opiate, Amphetamine, Barbiturate and Nicotine. We take out seats before a stage populated with sculpture, screens, a plethora of instruments, and a Victorian lounge seat.
Washington slinks out on stage during the string-section introduction, she sits shadowed on the lounge seat then she launches into a spine-chilling rendition of Sentimental Education. Its like opening floodgates, pouring forth a kind of stage presence usually reserved for the likes of PJ Harvey or Tori Amos, unleashing a soaring cannonball voice to which hometown shows had merely hinted. String-section interludes and video performance art divide the show’s movements, which are each sewn with the appropriate effect of their drug designation: after the transfixing hit of Opiate we get a the wide smile of Amphetamine (Letterbox, Public Pool) but the smile is short-lived; in the Barbiturate movement High Treason seems to rip something primal out of our performer, the song’s crescendo pushing her to a kind of breaking point. She retreats to the lounge seat for non-album song Mirror In The Mirror, featuring lyrics of painful hospital scenes and bargaining with the devil. An inhalation of Nicotine jolts the audience’s attention with upbeat Plastic Bag and lead single Holy Moses, but here’s where the show loses something: the radio-friendly tracks are certainly well-received, but the departure of tone fractures the show’s cohesion as a singular work. To elaborate, there’s a question lurking throughout Insomnia about the limits of form in pop music: Washington may want to present Insomnia as a singular work akin to performance art or symphony, but how achievable is this given its parts are still three-to-four-minute pop songs? In this way Insomnia remains the performance of an album with added flourish. Or is this the wrong question – is Megan Washington instead setting personal limits on her public interaction? Perhaps it’s not about raising expectations, perhaps Insomnia was not to be something that transcends the form of pop music performance, but instead limiting: setting boundaries beyond which repeated performance is far too personal. Performing an exhausting album can only exhaust the performer so many times. Thus for those of us lucky enough to witness this once-off, we received something very special.
PAUL RANKIN
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