September, 2010

“I find working with Beckett to be a joyous experience. Not the individual moments, this or that poignant passage, but his skill and genius is so, so graceful, and uplifting. I’m constantly inspired by it.” That’s Conor Lovett, currently touted as one of the world’s foremost Beckett specialists. He has just left Brisbane after performing [...]

With this show, part-cabaret, part-concert, part-play and part-sketch comedy, The Suitcase Royale define, or defy, what constitutes theatre. For the Sydney Theatre Company, by design or happenstance, the timing is interesting, since it coincides with the inaugural, long-overdue Sydney Fringe Festival. While I’d be one of the first to laud and applaud it, the fact [...]

I’ve seen a lot of things in darkened rooms. But never have I seen such an oversized vagina. Well, vulva, to be anatomically correct. And, believe me, I’ve looked. I dare say you will never have seen such a prodigious organ this side of Sydney Town Hall, or St. Mary’s Cathedral, either. I’m not sure [...]

Stifter’s Things is a composition for five pianos with no pianists. It is a play without actors. It is a performance without performers. Instead, things are placed before us, beautiful things from ages past, things that have fallen into decay but which have been restored or renovated or reinvented. The performance is the presence which [...]

The Hayloft Project bring their highly enjoyable mincing of Seneca’s Thyestes to the Malthouse Theatre as part of Melbourne’s Fringe Festival. As the myth has it, the two sons of King Pelops, Atreus and Thyestes, after being exiled from their home in Argos for killing their half-brother, agree to share the kingship of Mycenae. But [...]

Our Town. It’s not really my town, or yours, most probably. Unless you’ve a time-machine, rather than a Toyota, parked in the garage. A device that can take you back to the turn of the 20th century (remember that one?). And small-town America. But can we relate? Can we get over the hurdle of accents [...]

There’s more to dance than dancing, in the technical sense. I’ve said it before. And I’ll say it again. One can be highly athletic. Flexible. Skilled. Rehearsed. Precise. Passionate. Committed. Confident. Competent. Be adept at any number of moves. And still not really be a dancer. It doesn’t, I don’t believe, take one to know one. You know when you see one. Grace. Carriage. Elegance. Sensuality.

Bare Witness is an amazing dramatic collage describing the exhilaration, the horror, the outrage, the anguish and the dread hopelessness of combat-zone photography, fusing a compelling life story, expressive choreography, poetic visual effects, a complex moral dilemma and the best sound design of any production seen in Melbourne this year. It’s written by Mari Lourey [...]