Anthem’s opening scene, staged on an elevated balcony above the main action, metaphorically lobs this un-Australian social concept like a grenade onto the set below. It’s an austere space that doubles as a train carriage and a station concourse, a place of mingling, where people from a multiplicity of backgrounds, income groups, and ethnicities rub shoulders in the grind of getting from A to B and back again. The politics of Europe have been replaced by the divisions that cleave a cross-section of Melbourne commuters. They turn out to pivot around similar issues of deprivation, identity, and race.

The cast and set of Anthem (photograph by Pia Johnson)

Class, specifically an underclass, is a theme the authors have all explored before, individually and together. Anthem, commissioned by Arts Centre Melbourne, reunites playwrights Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, and Christos Tsiolkas. Twenty-one years ago, they collaborated on the much-lauded play Who’s Afraid of the Working Class?.

The structure of Anthem is similar, a series of scenes written by individual writers but linked by characters who appear in one another’s stories and by the use of a commuter chorus that creates bridges between the scenes. The pace, with a cast of twelve exceptionally well-honed actors under the direction of Susie Dee, rarely falters as we hurtle along the tracks of Melbourne’s commuter system and into its social faultlines.

Snaking between the text is music composed by Irine Vela, who was part of the original 1998 team. A duo of violin and double bass (Jenny M. Thomas and Dan Witton) punctuates the scenes, and Ruthy Kaisila, a busker, belts out Australiana, including the national anthem, I Still Call Australia Home, and Waltzing Matilda. She is the only one promoting shared values, but no one’s going to toss her a coin.

Using class as an exploratory device today has a different feel compared to the late 1990s. Then the term working class had a greater solidity; today it feels as antiquated as a cardboard tram ticket. The historical roots of Anthem chart how far we’ve travelled (not in the sense of progress) in two decades of economic rationalism, both in societal and theatrical terms.

Eva Seymour and Reef Ireland in Anthem (photograph by Sarah Walker)

Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? was a product of the Melbourne Workers’ Theatre, whose first production in 1987, State of Siege, explored what it meant to be a unionist. Who’s Afraid of the Working Class? was performed at Melbourne’s Trades Hall, with, from memory, several broadsides against the Victorian premier of the time, Jeff Kennett. It was very local and it spoke to a sense of audience solidarity.  The MWT bit the dust in 2012, and agit-prop theatre has shifted away from its Brechtian roots.

Anthem references a far more international hinterland with its political digs – Donald Trump has replaced Kennett as the epitome of political evil – and the cast reflects our more racially diverse society. The railway carriage includes a trio of threatening siblings, mouthy, insecure, and, despite having fathers from different continents, racist; a middle-aged woman who, we learn, is homeless and has been abandoned by her husband; a Sri Lankan student cheated of his wages; a Chinese woman in a violent marriage; a young mother with a short fuse and a hyperactive kid; and an elderly Greek couple who have lived through far greater hardships in a time of war. Everybody may have a mobile phone (and in a chilling scene of racist bullying, there’s a rare show of unity when several commuters whip out their devices to video the abuse), but few are sharing the same reality or expressing much empathy.

Anthem is bleak and often confronting, but it manages to avoid being didactic. We the audience may not be let off the hook, but the play crackles with humour and there’s a lyricism and springiness to the writing that reminds you what a fine team this is and how rarely we get to share in a project of this kind.

Anthem was presented at Playhouse at the Arts Centre Melbourne during the Melbourne International Arts Festival 2–6 October 2019. Performance attended: October 3.