Year: 2008

“The Pillowman” won the Lawrence Olivier Award for Best New Play after it was presented in London in 2003. It also was nominated for a Tony Award in 2005 in New York. On this outing I don’t think it will be similarly nominated in any such category in the Sydney Theatre Awards. The play is the same but clearly the production is not. This is the painful risk the playwright must take in the collaborative minefield of the Theatre. This play is set in a Totalitarian State somewhere, sometime. When it was done in 2003 and in 2005 in London…

Remember Patty Hearst and her kidnapping. Now remember Paris Hilton. Now think Poster Girl: Mindy Xyloine and have her kidnapped by some hippie group to promote their demands for free organic vegetables mix in media news and a police force corrupted by drugs and sex, highlight the celebrity creative team around our kidnapped Girl and you have the ingredients for this satiric cartoon of aspects of our contemporary society. It is a very amusing context and the writer has an edge with one line quips that elicit some good laughs. This play was originally workshopped at the AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL PLAYWRIGHTS’…

This is the seventh play of Tony McNamara that the Sydney Theatre Company has produced. It is a committed relationship. “So why a play about Catherine the Great? Injustice would be the main reason. Catherine the Great was in fact, really great, and yet she is remembered as ‘that Russian Queen who did it with a horse.’” Mr McNamara in his program notes tells us that was not true. He goes on to assure us that he is a writer and he “likes to make things up” and he wanted a story “that embodies the spirit of the person rather…

There will be a preamble. Forgive me. In the tradition of Alison Croggon, the Melbourne Art Blogger (see her notes on The Serpent’s Teeth) I thought I should declare my self interests when talking about ALTAR BOYZ. In my last blog concerning STONING MARY I complained of the series of doom and gloom works I had experienced this year and protested that I longed for another contrasting vision. On approaching ALTAR BOYZ I wondered whether I would regret what I had wished for. It is well established, and I am often quoted as saying, that “I HATE MUSICALS”. “I THINK…

When we enter the space thirteen actors are standing in a flat straight line across the widest part of the Griffin stage. The walls are black. The floor is black. There are some bricks full and whole, strewn across the stage. Later are revealed a few precast plastic chairs with metal legs. The people on stage are cheaply dressed. The clothes of the “working poor” (Maybe Target or K Mart).The lights dim down in the auditorium and a projected slide appears on two walls. “THE AIDS GENOCIDE. …THE PRESCRIPTION” Later another projection for another scene says “A CHILD SOLDIER” and…

This play was first performed in 1949. A year after that premiere on Broadway Miller was asked to write a first anniversary item for the New York Times. Of many observations the last paragraph is worth noting: “So what is there to feel on this anniversary? Hope, for I know now that people want to listen. A little fear that they want to listen so badly. And an old insistence – sometimes difficult to summon, but there nonetheless – that we will find a way beyond fear of each other, beyond bellicosity, a way into our humanity.“ Last night in…