American writer Edgar Allan Poe (19th January, 1809 – 7th October, 1849) cultivated mystery and the macabre. There is horror in his work. So, too, in the National Drama School’s What’s This?, devised by graduating actors, and focusing on mental health and torment. Six pieces, each featuring one of the six performers, were either derived…
What you read into and see in dance is very much about interpretation. Here is a piece where the mood is constantly shifting. What starts out as beautiful, gentle, caring and nurturing, turns into something frenetic and disturbing. So, what is at play? Why do we transition from calm to calamitous? Needs, wants and desires…
Life in all its messiness is played out in Lyric Opera’s chamber opera The Children’s Bach. With music by Andrew Schultz and libretto by Glenn Perry, it is based on a novella of the same name by Helen Garner. Set primarily in Melbourne in the 1990s, it centres on the fraught relationships in the Fox…
I can still recall imagery in my mind’s eye after reading Joseph Conrad’s vivid stories about the power of the sea. The fear, the vulnerability, the mystery and the delights of the ocean are apparent in the latest creative endeavour by Theatre Works. Set inside a makeshift, red, wooden phone booth, surrounded by colourful lights, in…
Take Henrik Ibsen’s controversial 1881 play – a scathing commentary on morality – and move it from its original Norwegian setting to the Victorian bush in the late 19th century. That is what the award-winning team of playwright Jodi Gallagher and director/designer Steven Mitchell Wright have done with searing impact. Having spent years in Paris, widow…
Fifteen-year-olds Arvy (Jess Sofarnos) and Thea (Megan Mitchell) are besties. They met in a science class and have been inseparable ever since. At their weekly sleepovers, they share intimate secrets, swap stories and say they love each other. You’re Being Dramatic juxtaposes one such rainy overnighter with a meeting at a pub they have many years later. By…
A loving but dysfunctional family is put through the wringer in Andrew Bovell’s Things I Know To Be True. Bob Price (Ben Grant) has worked from the age of 16. Now 63, he spent 30 years at a car manufacturing plant before he accepted a redundancy package four years ago. A keen gardener, he is generally empathetic…
Four actors … who break the fourth wall, track down a Melbourne man from a seven-minute rant obtained by a transcription service and give a potted history of the internet. That, in a nutshell, is the subject matter of the cleverly orchestrated play that puts the fear of God into you. In fact, humour and paranoia are…
Set in Galway, Ireland between May 2016 and March 2019, Duck Duck Goose explores sexual assault and its impact. I refer to the effect on the accuser and the accused, along with friends and family. Jane Scully (Rachel Nutchey) meets Chris Quinn (Mitchell Holland) in the aftermath of a house party, where Chris got wasted. Jane alleges she…
Chaos and trauma are at play in Every Lovely Terrible Thing. A highly dysfunctional family implodes and picks apart its innards. They are the Colemans who live a rundown weatherboard house on the outskirts of a country town. Cooper, the unemployed, gay, clothing designer grandson in his early 20s, likes dressing in women’s attire and flouncing about. He…
