Year: 2009

  Darlinghurst Theatre Company & Drowned 8 Productions present THE JUNGLE by Louis Nowra. Louis Nowra wrote this play and it premiered at The Sydney Theatre Company in 1995. In the program notes to this production Mr Nowra talks of this piece as an “intimate epic” and of “using a small cast to play many characters over a large spectrum of society.” 9 actors play some 29 characters over a sprawling three and a half hours in some sixteen scenes. In THE JUNGLE there are quite a collection of characters living in the Darlinghurst/Kings Cross area, “this is a world…

Photo – Marcus Graham – Pericles   Bell Shakespeare present PERICLES in Association with TAIKOZ. The Drama Theatre at the Sydney Opera House. Norrie Epstein in his book THE FRIENDLY SHAKESPEARE in his discussion of the Tragicomic Romances begins: “Fantastical, superficial, artificial, improbable, impressionistic, inferior, miraculous, boring – or the best: no one can agree on the merits of Shakespeare’s romances. The eminently reasonable Dr. Johnson dismissed them as foolish, and they are. But, in the words of the playwright Dennis Potter, they are “sweetly foolish”. With PERICLES, CYMBELINE, THE WINTER’S TALE, and THE TEMPEST we enter Shakespeare’s final period………

Photo – Alice Parkinson and Conrad Coleby – Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk ARTS RADAR in association with B Sharp present the world premiere of LADY MACBETH OF MTSENSK by Robert Couch, adapted from the novella by Nickolai Leskov in the Downstairs Theatre. Robert Couch and Joseph Couch have taken the 1864 novella by Nikolai Leskov and have adapted and staged it for a 2009 audience. This is a famous story made more famous by the Shostakovitch Opera which we have seen in Sydney this year from the Australian Opera. This version is fairly truthful to the structure of the major…

  Photo – Belinda McClory – The City Sydney Theatre Company at Wharf 2 present THE CITY by Martin Crimp. Presented by arrangement with the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre. Maybe written as a companion piece to Mr Crimp’s play THE COUNTRY (2000), THE CITY (2008) concerns a young couple, Clair (Belinda McClory) and Christopher (Colin Moody) living in a city under the contemporary pressures of job insecurity, and the influence of a world full of war, torture and terrorism, of all kinds – close at hand and far away. It reveals a world of the fracturing…

Photo – Lachy Hulme & Darren Gilshenan – Elling Sydney Theatre Company in association with the Ambassador Theatre group presents ELLING, based on a novel by Ingvar Ambjornsen. Stage adaptation by Axel Hellstenius in collaboration with Peter Naess. Translated by Nicholas Norris. Adapted by Simon Bent. At Wharf 1. ELLING, as you can read (above) comes to us through a very numerous set of creative hands: writers, translators and adaptors, (the screen play of the novel, which was the first of three films based on the books, which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign film in 2002, was…

  A BLACKBIRD PRODUCTION: STEEL MAGNOLIAS by Robert Harling at the Seymour Centre. “In the haven of Truvy’s beauty salon, six very different women come together to share their secrets and bare their souls, throwing in a little neighbourly gossip for good measure. From weddings to divorces, babies to funerals, new beginnings to happy endings, they weather every event in their lives with grace, determination, and perfectly coiffed hair. When tragedy strikes, it is in the familiar comfort of Truvy’s salon where they seek the solace and support that carries them through.” So goes the synopsis in the program notes.…