Year: 2014

Playwriting Australia in association with Carriageworks presents NATIONAL PLAY FESTIVAL at Carriageworks. As I had mentioned at the end of my last blog, Dear Diary: The National Play Festival. A four day festival: 12th-15th June. It began with a Keynote Address by Andrew Bovell entitled, HAROLD PINTER AT THE IVY. Here is a link to the speech and I thoroughly recommend that you read and/or watch it. Like the Harold Pinter Nobel Prize Lecture (2005), (which is also on google, and definitely worth knowing), Mr Bovell’s speech is an impassioned, and ethically argued provocation to all the writers, artists, of Australia.…

The New Theatre present WHY TORTURE IS WRONG, AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM, by Christiopher Durang at the New Theatre, Newtown, 3rd – 28th June. Luella, a mother, sweet, somewhat befuddled woman says somewhere in the comic chaos of Christopher Durang’s, WHY TORTURE IS WRONG, AND THE PEOLPE WHO LOVE THEM: “You know I don’t really know what normal is. That’s one of the reasons I go to the theatre. To learn that.  … Normal. Its such a conundrum for me.” Go to the New Theatre and see if you can find normal. I dare you. Christopher Durang is…

THE BOAT PEOPLE by Benedict Hardie. A Black Comedy. A co-production from The Hayloft Project and Rock Surfers Theatre Company at the Bondi Pavilion, Bondi Beach, 29th May – 21 June. THE BOAT PEOPLE is a new Australian play, in an hundred minute one act form. Devised by a team of artists: Holly Austin, Emily Rose Brennan, William Erimya, Benedict Hardie, Luke Joseph Ryan, Phil Spencer and Susie Youseff. There is the glint of light on water – silver, gleaming (Lighting by Verity Hampson). A little later, standing high, in a glass bedecked apartment (Set Design by Michael Hankin), a…

  Photo by Bill Reda Sydney Writer’s Festival and Sweatshop: Writing and Society Research Centre (University of Western Sydney) presents THREE JERKS, created by Michael Mohammed Ahmad at Wharf 2 Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company. From the flyer to the show: It is Sydney 2000. Year of the Olympic Games. A string of gang rapes take place across the western suburbs. The perpetrators are identified as muslims, arabs, middle-easterns and westies. Their victims are identified as non-muslim aussie pigs. The crimes divide Australia. A leb, a wog and a bogan emerge. They are writers. They tell their story. They don’t care…

  Photo by Noni Carroll Darlinghurst Theatre Company and Spooky Duck Productions present THE YOUNG TYCOONS – A Ruthless Comedy, by CJ Johnson at the Eternity Playhouse. Season: 16th May – 15th June. THE YOUNG TYCOONS by CJ Johnson, Directed by Michael Pigott, has arrived at the Eternity Playhouse, for its third Sydney season. Originally seen at the Darlinghurst Theatre in 2005, with a return season in 2006, the play is set in 2003. The Writer and Director in their program note: We have not re-set the play in the present – it could not exist now, precisely because of…

  Photo by Katy Green Loughrey Tooth and Sinew in association with Sydney Independent Theatre Company (SITCO) presents SCENES FROM AN EXECUTION by Howard Barker at the Old Fitzroy Theatre, Woolloomooloo, Sydney. Season:13th May – 31st May. SCENES FROM AN EXECUTION is a play from Howard Barker, written, originally, as a Radio Play in 1984, starring Glenda Jackson as Galactia, and was staged in 1990 at the Almeida Theatre, London, with Ms Jackson creating the role again. The play was presented in 2012 at the National Theatre of Great Britain, with Fiona Shaw, and there was a production presented at…