A successor to 1999’s Who’s Afraid of the Working Class?, Anthem reunites the same composer and quartet of playwrights to present another realist snapshot of the nation. It’s mainly set on Melbourne’s overcrowded trains, where people of different classes, genders, races and sexual orientations literally come face to face and “bum to groin” in this work’s irreverent language. It boldly tackles Australian society’s fragmentation and has several powerful moments, but these four perspective-packed interweaving plays sometimes lack cohesion.

Anthem. Photograph © Pia Johnson

The struggle to make ends meet is the main thread running through Anthem. Created by Christos Tsiolkas, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves and Andrew Bovell, and played by a talented, multi-tasking cast of 12, perhaps twice that many diverse characters reveal this struggle from various perspectives. The diversity is most apparent, if unlikely, in four half-siblings with different fathers: Anglo, Arab, Indigenous and sub-Saharan African. One of them is gay, and returning to Australia after escaping his family’s “bogan” recipe for failure: outer-suburban poverty and lack of education. His return provides Anthem’s prologue, placing what follows – including his three siblings’ aggressive encroachment into other train passengers’ personal space – within...