Mateo Askaripour’s debut Black Buck is a fast paced and always self-aware skewering of capitalism as a mechanism for both reinforcing racism and being part of the solution. Askaripour takes readers into the heart of the capitalist dream machine – disruptive start-ups selling dreams to the world – and finds it as repressive and unreconstructed…
The Great Australian Play is a thoroughly bewildering take on Australian history – specifically one of this country’s most alluring legends – and contemporary Australia. Of the former, I speak of a vast gold-bearing deposit in the MacDonnell Ranges in the Northern Territory purportedly discovered by Harold Lasseter around the turn of the 19th century. After…
If you haven’t heard of Kill Climate Deniers you probably should have. The hyperbolically titled play’s controversial take on the contentious climate change debate in Australia saw it hit the headlines in 2014 when its playwright David Finnigan received $19 000 from Arts ACT to write a play exploring climate change and Australian politics. The…
British author E.L. James’ novel Fifty Shades of Grey “struck” a chord around the world, just as Christian Grey loved to “lash” Anastasia Steele. Featuring bondage and sadomasochism, it was translated into more than 50 languages and has sold well over 100 million copies. Of course, further books followed and then a film series. The…
What price success? That’s the key question asked in Clare Barron’s Australian premiere satirical comedy Dance Nation. Set in the US, the seven kids – six girls and one guy – are looking to replicate their local dance club’s previous successes. They want to make it all the way to the national dance championships. But…
Freshly realized as a hot take on Perth’s monied-up western suburbs culture, The Real Housewives of Perth is based on the hit television show franchise that never failed to spill on the not-so-secret lives of rich ladies-who-lunch. (Though ‘lunch’ may be used here as a handy euphemism for selfies, shopping and next-level female power sledging)….
Joanne (Jessica Meyer), Gillian (Babette Bellini), Lulu (Hayley Fielding), Beezus (Elizabeth Horrowitz) and Penny (Lauren Evans) are the equally loved and feared glamourous Real Housewives of Brisbane. One by one they introduce themselves at the start of the Brisbane Arts Theatre musical of the same name, in parody of the US media franchise of shows…
Indigenous Australia’s fight for justice and equality is given superhero treatment in Blackie Blackie Brown. We may well be looking at the stage equivalent of the movies Deadpool or Kick-Ass. Exaggerated theatrics are liberally supplemented by evocative graphics, animation, mock television news reports, and mood lighting. The staging is most effective. A series of joined…
What was happening while young wizard Harry Potter and his friends were honing their skills at Hogwarts? What about the less skilled wizards and witches? They who would scarcely amount to much as Potter struggled against dark Lord Voldemort. Specifically, what happened to an orphan named Wayne Hopkins? Well … Puffs reveals all with much…
Esoteric claptrap or a masterful and challenging work? There’ll be advocates on both sides with The Square, which won the Palme d’Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. It’s slow moving and tortuously long. I defy anyone to neatly make sense of it all because there are undoubtedly obtuse elements. Underpinning it is the meaning of art….
