Tough, gritty and uncompromising. That is the incendiary combination that marks the work of co-creators Patricia Cornelius (also writer), Susie Dee (also director) and Nicci Wilks (also performer). They have done it before with RUNT, a study of the underdog, and now Bad Boy, which tackles misogyny and domestic violence. A female actor, Wilks, get…
Women treated shamefully by the Aussie Rules’ boys’ club. That is the theme of Patricia Cornelius’ gritty, feminist play In the Club. It concerns three young women who hook up with members of a football team and pay the price. Annie (Eva Seymour) transitions from a naïve, football-mad 15-year-old to an exploited 16-year-old, which sets the tone…
Their father was big and strong. He could be fun, but more often than not he was scary, angry, brutal and dogmatic. He couldn’t land a job and so money was always tight. He drank. After surviving WWII, which included being shipwrecked and a prisoner of war on the Thai-Burma Railway, he had PTSD. His wife,…
Patricia Cornelius is one heck of a writer. She doesn’t pull her punches. Her dialogue hits you between the eyes. And so it is with RUNT, which she has co-created with her collaborators in an earlier multi award-winning work, SHIT, Susie Dee and Nicci Wilks. RUNT benefits from a stellar solo showing by Wilks, a searing…
Promiscuity to hide the pain. That – in a nutshell – is the short life and times of Lolita, as evocatively captured by Patricia Cornelius in Slut. We chart her childhood, mainly through three frenemies (Michaela Bedel, Lauren Mass and Jessica Tanner) – girls who grew up with her, befriended her and then dissed her. They excitedly…
Hardly enough happens in The House of Bernarda Alba to sustain its 105 minute running time. Playwright Patricia Cornelius takes on Federico Garcia Lorca’s classic tragedy. Cornelius has transported the action from the villages of Spain in the 1930s to contemporary rural Western Australia. Along the way, she explores themes of passion, repression and isolation….
What a superb piece of writing, so magnificently realised … set up with a crackerjack opening monologue! Big Heart should be mandatory viewing in an ever-burgeoning multicultural Australia. Mother (Andrea Swifte) is affluent – significantly so. She has married and divorced twice and never aspired to give birth naturally. Now though, she decides the time…
