Forty-eight beautiful swans gracefully gliding across the stage in unison in Melbourne’s premier theatre is simply awe-inspiring … overwhelming (I was all but brought to tears). This is undoubtedly one of the most majestic balletic productions I have been privileged to witness. I plead with you to do all you can to secure a ticket…
The Rasputin Affair is a new Australian play by Kate Mulvany. The play is concerned with the assassination, in December 1916, of Rasputin; a Russian peasant, semi-literate monk and mystic, who exercised extraordinary power over the last of the ruling Romanoff family: Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra. There is a note in the…
An Easter Saturday night opening at the Old Fitz. And what an opening. Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, by Rajiv Joseph, presented by a young independent company, Mad March Hare Theatre, directed by Claudia Barrie, was an unexpected pleasure. One of the highest order. On the eve of the celebration of the Resurrection of…
Consensual is a play by British writer, Evan Placey. Mr Placey has written most of his plays with young audiences in mind. Consensual was commissioned by the National Youth Theatre Rep Company. It deals with sex and the classroom. It, like the 2006 film with Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal, deals…
Cults, brainwashing and exploitation seem to go hand-in-glove. So it is that a young woman, Lisa – played convincingly by Hayley Worsley – a tried and true member of a sect with Eastern leanings, practising spiritualism and free love, finds herself in the hands of a deprogrammer, Mel (Tim Ferris) in Heretics. Lisa agrees to…
The long-awaited 60th Anniversary production of Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady finally reached Brisbane last week, and word in the foyers is that sold-out audiences are not disappointed. A loving recreation of the original production, directed by none other than the first Fair Lady on Broadway, Dame Julie Andrews, the performances, music, costumes and…
Once, a reviewer in Edinburgh noted that Australian comedian Sam Simmons could read the phone book on stage and still be funny. So in his latest show, A – K this is exactly what he does, inset with a whole lot of randomness so cleverly crafted to tie its threads together that audience members remain…
County Kerry is a quiet, close-knit Irish community where everyone is a cousin or sorts and everyone’s stories have already been heard the night before in the local pub. So when a Hollywood crew comes to town to make a film (fil-em in the local dialect), there is excitement as many locals are hired as…
Crimes of the Heart was Beth Henley’s first full length play, and was seen at the Manhattan Theatre Club and then onto Broadway, where it played for 535 performances in the John Golden Theatre, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1981. I remember seeing it on my second trip to New York, Mary Beth Hurt as…
Two is play by Jim Cartwright written in 1989. It is a play for two actors playing fourteen characters. Two, like Mr Cartwright’s first and famous play, Road (1986), comes from his identity and personal ownership of the private dilemmas of his community, focusing on the marginalised and disenfranchised. He was born in Farnsworth, Lancashire,…
