Watching characters on stage whose lives are steeped in suffering, sadness, loneliness, and despair can be one of life’s great therapies. There’s a strange comfort in witnessing their struggles, knowing that our own lives, by comparison, are far less tumultuous. When we leave the theatre, we may find ourselves reinvigorated, inspired, even uplifted. Uncle Vanya,…
Joanna Murray-Smith’s remarkable insight, attention to detail and writing prowess are front and centre in a captivating production of Berlin at The MC Showroom. Australian Tom (Lachlan Hamill) has just landed in the German capital, keen to get to know the real city, not the tourist offering. He’s directed to a small watering hole, where he meets…
Brilliantly performed by Justine Clarke who, as the 27th Australian Prime Minister, displays determination, indignance and frustration, I would suggest one’s political predilection will have a fair say in how Joanna Murray-Smith’s words go down. As the writer, the latter has combined fact and fiction. She has taken incendiary language from shock jocks, political opponents and…
“There’s nothing original about the skeleton of Honour, the play” says its writer Joanna Murray-Smith. I would agree. Its subject has been tackled over and over – in film, theatre and book form – for centuries. It goes like this: Ageing male in long term marriage is seduced by young and exciting vixen. He leaves…
Passion, intellectual rigour and the Holocaust collide in Joanna Murray-Smith’s intense, high verbiage, sexually charged drama Berlin. Australian Tom (Michael Wahr) has just landed in the German capital, keen to get to know the real city, not the tourist offering. He’s directed to a small, hole in the wall bar, where he meets and is immediately drawn…
Superlatives are inadequate to describe a truly mesmerising performance from a woman of grace, charm and sublime talent. Bernadette Robinson in Songs for Nobodies inhabits upwards of 10 characters – English, American, Irish, French and Italian – like a second skin. She weaves stories and sings popular tunes and opera as five ordinary folk rub…
L’Appartement: Chaos in the City of Love is a play with lots of laughs, dark moments, some excellent acting from a top team and a set I’d be happy to live in! Joanna Murray-Smith worked hard as a director to bring her words to life, and it’s not an easy job. The plot sees an…
I long to see whatever Joanna Murray-Smith generates (and her output is prolific) … with very good reason. Her writing is pithy and pointed, insightful and invigorating. The shocking and dynamic Fury is a case in point. Salt is rubbed into raw wounds and new scars created in this “take no prisoners” drama about cultural…
Fifty-eight people died and more than 520 were injured in the Las Vegas slaughter. Joanna Murray-Smith wrote her powerful and affecting one-man play American Song long before that tragedy unfolded. Unfortunately mass shootings in the land of the free have become all too common. American Song was commissioned in the US and first produced there last year…
An emissary from a New York publishing house (Giuseppe Rotondella) is dispatched to Switzerland to convince reclusive crime novelist Patricia Highsmith (Jenny Davis) of The Talented Mr. Ripley fame to sign a new contract. A bold move to stage a two-hander at an hour forty five minutes with no intermission in the Heath Ledger. The…
