Month: March 2020

I was especially keen to see this play, mostly because of the writer and his growing reputation as a force in contemporary American playwriting. AN OCTOROON – 2014 (seen in Brisbane. Needs to be seen in Sydney), APPROPRIATE – 2014 (again unseen), and GLORIA – 2018, which we saw last year at the Seymour Centre. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a subversive writer with a tremendous sense of comedy and balanced political/social critique – he is kind of fearless. EVERYBODY – 2018 – is based on the 15th Century medieval mystery play – EVERYMAN. It tells of the Everyman who is summoned by…

CUSP is a new work by Mary Anne Butler. It has taken three years of discussion, development and rehearsal which included two weeks of that development – one week in Darwin and another in Sydney – with the writer, director and actors to find manifestation in a theatre. It is a quasi-poetic play that uses an abundance of ‘lists’ to achieve this – true to our Elizabethan and Jacobean forebears and their example. We meet three actors playing three young Northern Territorians at the cusp of having their life cycles moving from the teenage metamorphic to the young adult evolution.…

DISTORTED is the latest play from Australian writer, Xavier Coy, whose other plays BURIED and ARE YOU LISTENING NOW? I have seen, both at the OLD 505. Mr Coy’s writing has always intrigued, provoked and excited me. This work is 90 minutes long with no interval and charts ten characters in a journey-arc to depression. Mr Coy is exploring Mental Health. Director Richard Hilliar with Mr Coy and his actors have ‘workshopped’ the original collection of independent people into a text to reveal definite characters with individual narratives, all existing in the same world but not at all connected to each other.…

Ron Haddrick passed away on February 11th this year, 2020. A memorial service was held at NIDA on Sunday 1st March that included celebrants of this man’s life: Daughter: Lyn, Son: Greg, Granddaughter: Milly. Peter Carroll was the Master of Ceremonies and invited John Bell, Aubrey Mellor, Drew Forsythe, and Kirrily Nolan to speak. The surprise guest speaker, for some of us, was cricketer, Ian Chappell. Mr Chappell apologised for his presence but soon illuminated the raison d’etre for it. As a boy Ian Chappell used to watch Ron lead one of the local cricket teams in the Adelaide suburbs…

THEY TOOK ME TO A QUEER BAR, is a devised work by Tommy Misa. Mr Misa was inspired to honour the queer artists of the past that have built through hardship, persistence, talent and luck a tradition of queer performance and the creation of spaces to present their culture and share. Mr Misa is an employee of THE BEARED TIT, a performance bar in Redfern. If those walls and many others (RED RATTLER of Marrickville) could talk, what would they tell. This  work is a series of short vignettes illustrating interactions over the history of Sydney’s evolving queer performance growth.…

ARTSLAB: BEHIND CLOSED DOORS is Shopfront’s annual emerging artists festival. It offered a 6 month long residency, an industry mentor, professional masterclasses and a week long season to showcase their art works. Five emerging artists were chosen from a large set of applications. This presentation was the fruition of that creative opportunity. There were two foyer works. 1. AMPLIFIER by Tall Jan, is a video work by Brendan Donnellan aka Tall Jan. It consists of a series of edited self-interviews concerning a sexual transition. The mentor was Bhenji Ra. It is, frankly, a work that is not well executed either…