Month: March 2011

  Rachael Healey & Associates present the Melbourne Theatre Company production of DON PARTIES ON by David Williamson at the Sydney Theatre. David Williamson’s latest play DON PARTIES ON returns to some of his beloved characters of some forty years ago. DON’S PARTY (1971) was set on the evening of the 1969 Federal election. It concerns a group of young affluent friends, all with their personal, social and political achievements and aspirations on display. It is a splendid evocation of some aspects of the Australian culture of the period. It is full of personal hopes and collapses, of celebrations and…

  Sydney Theatre Company present: In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play by Sarah Ruhl, in the Drama Theatre at the Sydney Opera House. “If Henrik Ibsen and Oscar Wilde had decided to collaborate on a post-modern drawing-room comedy, the hotsy-totsy twosome surely would have turned out something very much like Sarah Ruhl’s genuinely hysterical new work,” (Theatremania). This is a quote from the Sydney Theatre Company’s advertisement for the show. It is a delightfully pitched idea, and I tend to agree with it. Sarah Ruhl is one of the new American writers making a splash, through dint of…

Belvoir presents THE WILD DUCK by Simon Stone with Chris Ryan after Henrik Ibsen in the Upstairs Theatre. THE WILD DUCK written by Simon Stone, also the Director, with Chris Ryan, after Henrik Ibsen’s play (1884) of the same name, is a new contemporary Australian play. This adaptation and re-writing, like Mr Stone’s other Ibsen inspired play (with Thomas Henning), THE ONLY CHILD (from Ibsen’s LITTLE EYOLF), as texts, presage a very good night in the theatre. Both of these texts are very interesting. This one better than the other, I felt. And while, if one is a committed Ibsenite,…