Performing Arts Reviews:
2008–2022

  POSTS IN THE PADDOCK presented by My Darling Patricia, produced by Marguerite Pepper Productions in association with Moogahlin Performing Arts for Performance Space, Carriageworks, as part of the EXCHANGE season. POSTS IN THE PADDOCK is a profoundly moving experience. This is the fourth production by My Darling Patricia that I have attended, the others were: POLITELY SAVAGE (2007), NIGHT GARDEN (2009) and AFRICA (2011). Since that first encounter in 2007, with POLITELY SAVAGE at the old Performance Space, I have always anticipated the work with high expectations. All original work, from concept, writing and form exploration, across multi-media usage…

God’s Ear – Trailer from Anne Brito on Vimeo. Pursued by a Bear and The Reginald Theatre, The Seymour Centre present GOD’S EAR by Jenny Schwartz in the Downstairs Theatre at the The Seymour Centre, Sydney. A week, and I have read the very satisfactory new Jeffery Eugenides novel THE MARRIAGE PLOT. Began Gillian Mears’ FOAL’S BREAD. Re-read Kenneth Lonnergan’s LOBBY HERO – 2001, (The New York times having suggested that it may be the best American play of the first decade of the millennium); David Hare’s and Howard Brenton’s play PRAVDA – 1984, because the principal character has shadows…

ArtsLab 11 Performance season SLOW REVEAL – Six New Works In a Timely Fashion. The Shopfront Contemporary Arts and Performance program at Shopfront Theatre, Carlton, Sydney. SLOW REVEAL – Six New Works In a Timely Fashion are part of this year’s Shopfront’s 5th Artslab season. The new Artistic Director, Caitlin Newton-Broad tells us “from ArtsLab’s pilot residency in 2007, this is an intensive program for emerging artists to engage with their own work and also to practice within a community arts co-operative, at every level. I was lucky to work closely with these six young artists this year on Shopfront’s…

  New Theatre  presents WOMEN, POWER and CULTURE at the New Theatre, Newtown. The New Theatre is the longest continuous running theatre in Sydney. This company has a long and important place in the theatre culture of Sydney (if not in Australia, with its fellow companies in other capitals, under the banner of the New Theatre). “We dared a group of Sydney’s leading and emerging female playwrights to tell the stories that lie behind the triumphs and struggles that mark women’s contribution to our political, social and cultural life. It’s amazing to think that it’s taken Australian women 109 years…

  Performance Space presents BARGAIN GARDEN with Theatre Katanka and Ensemble Offspring in Track 5, Carriageworks. Carlos Gomes, the director and conceiver of this project tells us: This performance installation seeks to examine the urge we all share ‘to have it all’, and to explore how we use ‘stuff’ to present our identities. We wanted to investigate the process by which objects transform us into fashion icons, experts, gods and goddesses, equipped for any eventuality. All this, despite the high environmental price. We sought to examine the techniques of marketing and product  promotion in this consumer’s paradise, and to reflect…

  Pedro Collective in association with Tamarama Rock Surfers Theatre Company presents SPROUT  by Jessica Bellamy at the Old Fitzroy Theatre. SPROUT by Jessica Bellamy is a short play of speculative fiction, occupied with a future world that has been destroyed, drought plaqued, wind blown and is clinging to the careful nurturing of seeds into ‘sprouts’. Sprouts that become plants, a frog and a human. A bleak dystopian world of grim survival. A woman (Ashley Ricardo) carefully protects seedlings in jars, spooning water into the jarred soil that progressively grow into plants, whilst contemplating her own body, as it experiences…