The Divinyls’ Chrissy Amphlett was the kind of rock star we just don’t make anymore: brashly subversive, mercurial, brightly burning and gone all too soon. She grew out of the dick-swinging pub rock scene of the late 70s but retained a punk feminist edge throughout her career, a sense of danger and defiance. Actor Sheridan Harbridge attempts to revive Amphlett’s spirit in this part-biographical tour, part-tribute concert, which is a loving – if fragmentary and uneven – panegyric to a lost rock goddess.
When approaching this kind of material, a performer can aim for a precise and mannered recreation of every vocal tick and facial expression or settle for something more suggestive and impressionistic. Amplified opens with a solid, energising version of I’ll Make You Happy, and it’s immediately clear that Harbridge has opted for the latter approach. She borrows some of Amphlett’s inflections and vocal mannerisms but we’re aware we’re watching Harbridge channel an attitude rather than fully submerging herself into character. This is both Amplified’s charm and limitation.
Amphlett grew up in Geelong – according to her, merely the first in a series of prisons she’d have to escape – when it was still a rough and dangerous place to live, dominated by the Ford factory and a heavily industrialised waterfront. Harbridge evokes those early years of abusive men and nasty cops, of sexual violence and drug addiction, culminating in a rendition of Boys in Town that is potent in its desperation. When she sings “Get me out of here”, we can feel the stakes.
This is also true of scenes set much later in Manhattan, where a post-Divinyls Amphlett prepares a solo show she’ll never get to perform (she was tragically cut down by cancer in her early 50s). Her decline is subtly suggested and poignantly underpinned by a rendition of Good Die Young – although it seems an odd decision dramatically to treat the bulk of her time with the Divinyls as an ellipsis, given how central that period was to her fame. We will hear the big hits eventually – songs like Pleasure and Pain and I Touch Myself – but they aren’t as well supported by the biographical material and so we don’t feel them as intimately or acutely.
For a large part of the (relatively short) run time, Harbridge indulges in a kind of wish fulfilment, envisaging the show we’re watching as an actualisation of that unrealised solo show in New York. This “final act before the curtain” narrative device seems ubiquitous in music biographies – from Renée Zellweger’s Judy Garland biopic to the play about Billie Holiday’s final performance, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill – and while it gives Amplified some structure, it feels hesitant and half-hearted. By the conclusion, the device seems to have been abandoned altogether.
Director and co-creator Sarah Goodes tries to wrangle Amplified into something vigorous and coherent but, while there are moments of joy and jubilation, no truly illuminating portrait of the singer emerges. If Amphlett were more famous, the details of her life and arc of her career better known, this kaleidoscopic approach might have worked well; the uninitiated may find it all a bit confusing.
Amplified works best when it threads Harbridge’s own feminism through Amphlett’s biography, when she connects directly to the songs and the life like plugging into a power grid. Early in the piece, Harbridge explains the effect Amphlett had on her sexual awakening, with an anecdote about a bus and the seam of her pants that perfectly elucidates a song like I Touch Myself. But she doesn’t perform the song here, inexplicably leaving it to the end like a tease. When it does arrive, it feels perversely like an afterthought.
There is a strange ambivalence haunting the edges of Amplified in its current state. Harbridge seems preoccupied with the differences between herself and Amphlett: she eschews any attempt to look like her – there’s no red wig or school uniform, for example – and only flirts with an imitation of her sound. Harbridge comes from the world of musical theatre, with its tendency to neatness and closure, but Amphlett was a bone fide rock star, messy, obstinate and brazen. Until she finds her inner rock goddess, Harbridge’s tribute will remain stubbornly underdone.
Amplified: The Exquisite Rock and Rage of Chrissy Amphlett is on in Melbourne until 13 June as part of Rising festival, then Brisbane festival 19-21 September
