Take a real-life story and drop into it an actor, entertainment personality or media figure and ask them to play along without any rehearsal (in other words, a cold read). That is the conceit at the heart of Echo, written by the most performed playwright in Iranian theatre, Nassim Soleimanpour (White Rabbit, Red Rabbit and…
Start with the facts and lace it with fiction. That is what screenwriter Nathalie Leuthreau and director Guillaume Nicloux have done with French stage star Sarah Bernhardt (22nd October, 1844 – 26th March, 1923). She became a global sensation. Bernhardt was spirited, determined, heavily opinionated and charismatic. Lovers of both sexes and admirers were plentiful….
I am a firm believer that everyone has a story to tell if you dig deep enough. Of course, some are arguably more compelling than others. Creator and performer Bron Batten has quite a tale to relay. It involves her ill-fated affair with a political polar opposite. She is a Left-leaning, Greens voting, almost vegan,…
The complexities of marketing and manipulation at its finest are on show in a fictional horror show that has real world implications. It all goes down in the American Midwest 48 years ago, but the effects are felt today. Going toe to toe are two ad men. One is a seasoned Southern oil man, the…
What happens if you are a doctor and make a questionable call? Not just any questionable call, but one that can mean the difference between life and death? That is the conceit at the centre of a tense Scandinavian drama. Alex (Ozlem Saglanmak) is a neurologist who works at a busy hospital. The attending doctor…
Dear Son is a powerful piece of theatre that deserves full houses every night. It stars five Indigenous male actors who not only perform the work but embody the sentiments presented. The play has its roots in the book of the same name by Thomas Mayo, in which 13 Indigenous men wrote letters to their…
While I sincerely wish it weren’t so, the power struggles the proliferate globally ensure that Shake & Stir’s brilliant adaptation of George Orwell’s prescient and dystopian novel 1984 appear chillingly real. We are in Oceania, where Big Brother rules with an iron fist. What BB says goes. If he says 2 + 2 = 5,…
Evocative and entertaining, All is Good … in the Glow of Moonlight is a remarkable insight into the life and times of Soviet writer Isaac Babel and his creations. It is resplendent with vivid storytelling and fine music. Babel (played by Joseph Sherman) was born in Moldavanka, a historical part of Odessa, in the Russian…
It is October 1915. Private James Martin (Oliver Tapp) is lying in bed on the hospital ship the Glenart Castle coughing his lungs out. Memories of his family back home in Australia come flooding back. This is the story of a boy who, after blackmailing his parents, enlisted in the Army, having falsified his age….
A delightful new play with originality stamped all over it, Welcome Home concerns two women who each believe they own the same house. Joyce (Julie Arnold) is elderly. She has just returned to the home her father built, having spent several months in hospital and rehab after a fall, only to find the place considerably…
