A Friend of Dorothy'sI first saw The Man from Mukinupin when it was new in the late 1970s and everyone in the cast was white. Since then I don't recall seeing another play by Dorothy Hewett and, like so many other playwrites whose names are not David or Williamson, her work seems to vanished from the boards. Hewett’s 1979 musical play was an unlikely way of celebrating Western Australia’s 150th birthday. Set around the time of the First World War it shows the ugly side of the Anzac legacy, with the local war hero Harry Tuesday (Craig Annis) becoming ...
Archives for “Australian Writing”
La Chat Noir: A (B)romance in One ActI Love You, Bro is a creepy little black comedy that is becoming justifiably famous since its debut at the 2007 Melbourne Fringe and subsequent season at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Set in England the eighty minute solo act is told by Johnny (Ash Flanders) who recounts how, as a lonely fourteen year-old, he began a chat-room relationship that nearly cost him his life. Bored and frustrated Johnny spends his nights at his computer talking to equally bored and frustrated strangers until he meets by chance another boy in his town who ...
Three little Kittens have lost their Wittens Traumatised by her husband's disappearance, Kitten's frantic reaction is shared by three actors creating the physical and vocal sensation of a person experiencing the upswing of bi-polar depression. Determined to take up the search after search and rescue missions have failed, Kitten determines to hire boats, diving equipment and pay for it all with a benefit concert. Battling against her increasing mania, her friend Manfred tries to calm and dissuade her. Like last year's Criminology, Kemp's play spends a lot of its time representing visually and dramatically the state of severe mental illness, ...
Brief EncounterJoanna Murray-Smith's 90 minute two-hander makes a virtue out of the trend for 90 minute, de-intervaled plays by being a story about that takes exactly 90 minutes in real-time . William (Kim Gyngell) is now a celebrity actor with a bulging schedule that includes his imminent marriage to a German celebrity actress more appropriate to his new status. He makes a flying visit to his ex-wife Isabel (Melinda Butel) who has begged some time to meet with him. She is an art restorer, currently working on a look-alike of Van Eyck's wedding portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his bride ...
What do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning? Even a joke should have some meaning - and a child's more important than a joke, I hopeThrough the Looking Glass. Chapter 9Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, along with his other non-academic writings (as an academic and under his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, he published mathematics and logic treatises) seemed to escaped operatic settings until quite recently. A 'Musical Dream Play' appeared as early as 1888 but apart from small scaled adaptations for school and amateur performance major English composers left ...
A chi più debb’io mai l’intensa vogliaSfogar con pianti o con parole mester,Se d ital sorte ‘l ciel, che l’ame veste,Tard’o per tempo alcun mai non ne spoglia?[To what purpose do I express my intense desirewith tears and sorrowful words when heaven, which clothes my soul, neither sooner or later relieves me of it?]Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) Holding the Man is a double tribute. Timothy Conigrave's tribute to the man he loved for more than half of his short life and a tribute by the Griffin Theatre Company to Conigrave himself who was an early member of the company working with ...
She's Gotta Have ItI agree with Harry Kippax's estimation (Nation, 1 June 1963*) that The Season at Sarsaparilla is a "rich, relevant, accessible play ... None who cares for drama, Australian or otherwise should miss it". White's story of adultery in complacent suburbia is designed to provoke. A character Roy (Eden Falk) is introduced to act as chorus/participant constantly criticising that complacency while the adultery is pre-empted by another chorus, this time of dogs baying for a bitch on heat while the soon to be adulterous wife Nola (Pamela Rabe) soaks up the sexual atmosphere like a sponge. The louchness ...
Chamber of HorrorsA welcome return of Brian Lipson’s multi-layered theatrical extravaganza. His one man show that sets out to be a piece about the 19th century social-scientist Francis Galton but which turns into and fantasia on the nature of theatrical performance is as funny as it is fascinating. Galton is best remembered as the founder of Eugenics. In his time (the second half of the 19th century, Galton died in 1911, the same year as that other great English satirist W.S. Gilbert) his theories were considered cranky like Phrenology and all those other pseudo-sciences. Only the connection ...
Through a Dark GlasslyHannie Rayson’s play, like the enormously popular adaptation of A B Facey’s A Fortunate Life that played to over 30,000 people back in 1984, is one of those plays about the Great War told through the eyes of an ‘everyman’ rather than an official hero. In this case it is told through eyes that were clouded for half a century.Nelson Ferguson was a promising artist who served on the Western Front. Mustard gas robbed him of his full sight but he struggled on, raising a family and making a career in art none the less.Rayson adapts his ...
A story dealing with one of the most shocking murders committed by a young person in recent Australian history might be a surprising subject for Arena Theatre Company, an organisation for and about youth. Even more surprising is the bringing together of two of the most formidable emerging writers, Lally Katz and Tom Wright to author it. Based on the murder in 1997 of the engineer, Joe Cinque who was murdered by law student lover Anu Singh, the same event that Helen Garner explored in her book Joe Cinque's Consolation.Criminology is based on fact but is a fictional account of ...
Let There Be Light ... Comedy!Uncle Semolina (and Friends) is a performing arts collective with a knack for turning out memorable theatre in the most unlikely places like an abandoned shop or a shipping container. After the success of their reinterpretation of the ancient and homoerotic epic Gilgamesh Uncle Semolina are tackling that daddy of all epics, the Bible, in their Chronicles of the Old Testament, a selection of the sordid, taboo-ridden and violent stories from the Old Testament so beloved of fundamentalists.Using their trademark props, namely a collection of children's toys and kindergarten furniture, the cast act out the ...
