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[Published in The Age, May 17 2013] Nascent company Fear&Love’s contemporary take on clowning has all the slapstick antics and cartoon buffoonery that the red nose mandates, but this isn’t a show for the rug rats. Proceedings quickly get dark when this troupe of fools is imprisoned by a villainous thespian (Michael Gosden), a smiling […]
May 14, 2013
[Published in The Age, May 14 2013] This adaptation of Shakespeare’s sonnets was conceived by eminent British theatremaker Peter Brook, author of the manifesto The Empty Space (1968), which director Kate Herbert saw performed in Paris in 2007. Here Herbert gives free rein to Brook’s notion that theatre can occur anywhere we ordain a stage, […]
May 9, 2013
[Published in The Age, May 9 2013] This phenomenal one-woman show is a mordant assessment of America’s public school system, and the comic inadequacy of standards-based education reforms introduced by the Bush Administration. Malcolm X High, one of the toughest and most disadvantaged schools in the Bronx, is our stage. Staff turnover is sizeable and […]
April 29, 2013
[Published in The Age, April 29 2013] Yugoslavia’s disintegration in the 1990s engendered Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War Two, the ethnic clashes between successor states resulting in genocides that killed well over 100,000 people. The international media soon moved on to newer battles, however, as the Yugoslav Wars stretched out across the decade. Danish […]
April 26, 2013
[Published in The Age, April 26 2013] I’ve never been entirely convinced by Matthew Lutton’s direction. There’s no doubt the Perth-born theatremaker has a strong vision, but the honorific wunderkind that’s still attached to his name after a decade’s practice points to some of my reservations: what some see as youthful bravery can come across […]
April 23, 2013
[Published in The Age, April 23 2013] American jack-of-all-genres James Agee – as regarded for his remarkable journalistic work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) as for screenplays such as The Night of the Hunter (1954) – began his autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family, in 1948. Unfinished before his own death in […]
April 18, 2013
[Published in The Age, April 18 2013] A torrid affair between Sam Shepard and Patti Smith culminated in Cowboy Mouth, a one-act play that the couple mythically wrote over the course of two nights passing a typewriter back and forth. The protagonists are amped up versions of Smith and Shepard—Cavale, “a chick who looks like […]
April 13, 2013
[Published in The Age, April 13 2013] Staging an independent musical is not an easy affair, when you’re up against budgets of the likes of last year’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, the most recent Stephen Sondheim musical to play in Melbourne. Director Tyran Parke has done remarkably well with […]
March 3, 2013
Published in The Age, March 4 2013 (Below is the unedited version, which was cut on publication for space.) THREE AND A HALF STARS With debates surrounding the adequacy of Australia’s mental health system flaring, Blue/Orange remains sadly relevant nearly 13-years on—an apt choice to kick off Mockingbird Theatre’s 2013 season. Set in London, Christopher […]
November 26, 2012
[Published in The Age, November 26 2012] FOUR STARS Los Angeles is fast-forwarding towards doomsday. The dream factory churns out a nightmarish reality, a world where the talk show host is the prophet: ”Everything gets too big and then it ends.” Playwright Declan Greene melds the pop cultural obsessions of his work in trash theatre […]
May 18, 2013
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