Month: August 2019

CITY OF GOLD, is a new Australian play written by actor, Meyne Wyatt – his first play. And what a debut play it is! Writing a play was a plan that Meyne Wyatt had thought would happen in the future when he felt more established as an artist. He was not yet ready. Then, a ‘perfect storm’ of personal events caught him off-guard and accumulated into an overwhelming state of depression that conjured a responding energy, driven by a ‘rage’, that forced him to sit down and write. Writes Meyne in the program notes: So, I did what many first-time…

TABLE, is a 2013 play by British playwright, Tanya Ronder. David Best builds a table in London somewhere. It is later taken to Tanganyika, by a family member, Sarah, as part of her missionary ‘dowry’. It shares in the ‘adventures’ of this family and in due course returns to South London. A table, six generations. A table that witnesses the dramas and triumphs of the family Best. The play is a neat old-fashioned evening and has the talents of the actors playing 23 different characters over a century or more to bring it passionately to life. Julian Garner is most…

I had just finished my schooling in a traditional Catholic school and was investigating what ‘real’ life was like outside the indoctrinations of that institution, at Teacher’s College and University. I was only 16 turning 17 but even then I had become a cinema addict – escaping real life?, how immaturely ironic, eh? – and although my breeding, of late, was mostly school holiday Disney or Jerry Lewis comedies (except, of course, the free-to-air television repertoire), I took myself off to one of the ‘risqué’ Cinema Art Houses (The Savoy?) I had read about in The Daily Mirror, in Sydney,…

Three years in the making (not very long, really) Opera Australia (OA) commissioned a new work with Music by Australian Composer, Elena Kats-Chernin, with a Libretto by Australian Playwright, Justin Fleming, focusing on the life of an iconic Australian painter, Brett Whitely. Whitely, in life, was a controversial figure. He is, still, a controversial figure. His art however, has grown more and more powerful as time as moved on. Born in 1932, he died young at the age of 53. The death as a result of a drug overdose. Whitely had become in 1985 an incurable addict. The Opera Australia…

This production, of A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE, by Iain Sinclair was first presented at the Old Fitz Theatre in Woolloomooloo, in 2017. There has been some major casting changes with Anthony Gooley now playing Eddie Carbone and Scott Lee essaying the antagonist, Rodolfo. Otherwise, Giles Gartrell-Miles (Louis), David Lynch (Alfieri) David Soncin (Marco) Zoe Terakes (Catherine) and Janine Watson (Beatrice), are re-creating their original contributions. Written By Arthur Miller, originally as part of a double-bill programer (A MONTH OF TWO MONDAY’S, the other half), in 1955, it was revised into the form that we see here at the Ensemble…

THE TORRENTS, is an Australian play written by Oriel Gray. It was the joint winner of a prestigious playwriting award from the Playwright Advisory Board (PAB) in 1955, sharing with SUMMER OF THE SEVENTEENTH DOLL, by Ray Lawler. The Lawler play began a rich Australian production history in 1955 that took it onto the National and International stages: London, New York, and, still appears regularly today as part of the Australian Theatre Companies repertoire. On the other hand, Ms Gray’s play was almost entirely neglected, forgotten, and did not receive a professional stage production until 1996 in Adelaide. Although, there…