Month: August 2019

CAROLINE, OR CHANGE, is a work, an autobiographical work from Tony Kushner. He is famous for ANGELS IN AMERICA (1993) – maybe, as well, for the screenplay of LINCOLN (2012). Born in Manhattan, his family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, when he was a young boy. He wanted to write about race relations, the civil rights movement,  African Americans and Southern Jews in the early 1960’s. This play comes from sorrow, from anger and grief, and also from hope learned from history, from recent history, which has shown us both the terrors and also the pleasures of change, which shows that…

Mike Bartlett wrote AN INTERVENTION in 2014. He had just had an amazing response to his quasi-Jacobean verse play called KING CHARLES III, which Sydney saw on tour here a few years ago in the Roslyn Packer Theatre. Mr Bartlett is, probably, the outstanding young male writer in the British Theatre at the moment – ‘hot, hot, hot’. The Old Fitz introduced his work to Sydney with a production of COCK (2009) and later with BULL (2013). AN INTERVENTION, is a play for two actors: A and B – the roles are not gender or age specific. In this instance at…

WEST SIDE STORY debuted in 1957 on Broadway. Four genius artists somehow subdued their egos to collaborate as an Ensemble to produce one of the great works in the Musical Theatre canon: Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents and Jerome Robbins. A motion picture version was made and arrived in 1961 winning 10 Academy Awards – it created a permanent number of indelible moments. (please read my 2010 review of another production of WEST SIDE STORY*** to get my grasp of this work’s greatness). This production led by American Choreographer/Director, Joey McKneely is the second version of this iconic work…

RAINBOW’S END, is a play by Jane Harrison, author of STOLEN (1998). Both of these plays have become part of the school HSC syllabus. RAINBOW’S END, written in 2005, is an evocation of the lives of three generations of First Nation’s women: the Yorta Yorta nation, in the 1950’s, in the Northern Victoria region of Sheparton and Mooroopna, on the banks of the Goulburn River. It is the gentle and tender telling of some social studies indigenous history. The history of the women seeking justice by voicing the need for better housing for their families, and finding that power through…

LIFE OF GALILEO, by Bertolt Brecht has been adapted by Tom Wright for this present Belvoir Theatre production. My introduction to the Galileo play was through the British translation into English by John Willlett. It was this that I first read as an acting student years ago, and re-read before seeing this production, along with the translation that Brecht had worked with the actor Charles Laughton that premiered in Los Angeles in 1947. Brecht had exiled himself from Nazi Germany with the rise to power of Adolph Hitler, and while in Switzerland began working on this play between 1937-39, it…

WINK, is an American play by Jen Silverman. Earlier in the year we saw a production of another of her plays: THE MOORS. Sophie (Eloise Snape) and Gregor (Graeme McRae) are recently married but now drifting apart. Sophie has a cat. For Gregor, Sophie’s attachment to their cat Wink (Sam O’Sullivan), is too uncomfortable for him to endure. He skins the cat – murder’s it – and keeps it’s pelt of fur in a box that becomes a sexual face-stroking turn-on! Sophie and Gregor coping with the loss of the cat see their therapist, Dr Frans (Matthew Cheetham), who becomes…