Month: June 2011

VICTORY by Howard Barker was the last time that Judy Davis was on stage in Sydney. It was to see her that I bought my tickets to attend THE SEAGULL at Belvoir. To be able to watch Ms Davis on stage again, is too thrilling an opportunity to miss. A lot of other people have felt the same. The season was sold out – all but standing room – for weeks before the opening. Some of my friends bought their tickets despite the fact that it was another Chekhov play, the recent Sydney Theatre Company production of UNCLE VANYA having…

  Two Birds One Stone in partnership with Darlinghurst Theatre Company presents THE COMING WORLD by Christopher Shinn. THE COMING WORLD is a relatively early play by young American playwright Christopher Shinn. The Darlinghurst Theatre Company have also presented another of his works, DYING CITY  a few years back. His latest play, PICKED  has just had a rapturous response from the press and public in New York this past April/ May. Mr Shinn is a playwright worth getting to know. (OTHER PEOPLE, WHAT DIDN’T HAPPEN and WHERE DO WE LIVE). A young woman, Dora (Cheree Cassidy) finds herself dealing inadequately,…

Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester in Association with Andrew KAY and Liza MCLEAN presents HAUNTED by Edna O’Brien in the Playhouse Theatre at the Sydney Opera House. Edna O’Brien is an esteemed novelist who also writes for the theatre. A few years ago her play VIRGINIA with Ruth Cracknell and Jennifer Hagan (on the life and writings of Virginia Woolf) had a great success around Australia. HAUNTED is a ‘small’ gem of a play, redolent with language, images and observations of life of some ordinary people, who, in her hands become, momentarily, extraordinary. “With my plays … I imagine a place…

  Chester Productions and the Tamarama Rock Surfers present ROPE by Patrick Hamilton at the Bondi Pavilion Theatre. ROPE by Patrick Hamilton is a 1929 thriller, made memorably into a film by Alfred Hitchcock (1948). Although, Hamilton himself claimed it was nothing more than “a De Quincey-ish essay in the macabre” and it may have lost some of its flesh-creeping power, it can be ,if, done with meticulous style and respect a very good and maybe, thought provoking time in the theatre. In 2009, the Almeida Theatre in London revived it stylishly and it was uniformly received with enthusiastic response…

  Arts Radar in association with atyp Under the Wharf present TOOTH OF CRIME by Sam Shepard at atyp Theatre, Pier 4, Hickson Road, Sydney. TOOTH OF CRIME at atyp is the third Sam Shepard play we have seen in Sydney in the last year. FOOL FOR LOVE, Downstairs Belvoir and TRUE WEST for the Sydney Theatre Company being the other two. Sam Shepard: “First off let me tell you that I don’t want to be a playwright, I want to be a rock and roll star. I want that understood right off. I got into writing plays because I…

THE KISS directed by Susanna Dowling, is a staged reading of four short stories, unedited for the stage, by Guy De Maupassant, Peter Goldsworthy, Kate Chopin and Anton Chekhov. What all the stories have in common is the action of a kiss. “They (the writers) reveal a kiss to be a marker of something changing forever; a transgression; a boundary crossed; a door opened…. Each story has a strong sense of foreboding of what comes after the kiss – regret, compromise, disillusion, pain, a loss of innocence.” The four actors, Catherine Davies, Rita Kalnejais, Yalin Ozucelik and Steve Rodgers and…