Our Town, 1938 Thorton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning ode to small-town American life, requires only minimal production values, with the playwright calling for no curtain, no scenery, and an empty stage in half-light. The play ignores most dramatic conventions. It is set in the actual theatre where it is being performed, but the year is, as…
While the translation of films for the stage has become routine, screen-to-stage musicals can be troublesome, especially when the source material is not a musical in and of itself. In the case of Shrek The Musical, however, the stage show has everything that made the movie fun and then some. Through David Lindsay-Abaire’s book and…
With stone fruit now on sale and schools this week farewelling their Senior students, it is clear that summer holidays are but a whisper away. For many in this COVID-19 year, Christmas holidays will mean a road trip to a regional destination, which makes Queensland Theatre’s world premiere production, The Holidays (which was postponed due…
It seems fitting that, whether coincidentally or otherwise, the day after Queensland Theatre welcomed audiences back to previews of Kieran Hurley’s Mouthpiece, the company unveiled plans for the brave new world of theatre in 2021. The program, the first from Artistic Director Lee Lewis is certainly a season for our times, filled with love, laughter,…
Mouthpiece … it is the name of an artwork by Declan Swan (Jayden Popik in an impressive Queensland Theatre debut), but it also has multiple other meanings within Kieran Hurley’s very clever and often ironic award-winning play of the same name. ‘I wanna live like common people, I wanna do whatever common people do’, Pulp’s…
Vincent River is not a location; it is the name of the character at the centre of Philip Ridley’s powerful 2000 one act play of the same name that addresses homophobic-based violence, which can really be extended to include violence against any form of difference. However, even with this knowledge, Vincent’s character remains elusive as,…
Noni Hazlehurst is unrecognisable as dishevelled vagrant Christie, wandering about the rubbish that litters the Cremorne Theatre’s ramshackle staging in Mother. Christie is a homeless alcoholic, sorrowful but resolute in her attempts to survive on the suburban fringe of Melbourne. And Hazlehurst inhabits her just as Christie inhabits the littered debris of Kat Chan’s set design….
The 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire is the most celebrated of Tennessee Williams’ works. The classic drama is poetically symbolic but also grimly naturalistic, as represented by the detached but detailed staging of Brisbane Arts Theatre’s production. The staging emphasises the play’s symbolism through its use of glassless mirrors and also aesthetically. The lighting…
Pre-show music and mingling sets the tone of The Neighbourhood, as the show’s performers (Cieavash Arean, Nima Doostkhah, Aurora Liddle-Christie, Dr Matt Hsu, Naavi Karan, Anisa Nandula and Amer Thabet) converse with the audience to prompt conversation around consideration of our neighbourhoods. Clearly, the concept of home is a complicated and abstract one and it…
The satire about the film and publishing industries in Sydney (the Emerald City of the title) is also about marriage and its strains, especially when it is of two competitive partners trying to find a balance in life. This is Australia of the late 1980s, full of entrepreneurial optimism and materialism, that see antihero protagonist…
