Performing Arts Reviews:
2008–2022

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…

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…