Performing Arts Reviews:
2008–2022

I paid up my $50 to become a member and join in the exploration of a season “of intimate events in and around the vast spaces of Carriageworks.” 50 bucks well spent. It is a bit like having a degustation at a restaurant. Some of it is great, layered with sensations, some of it is unpalatable but all of it is interesting even in the negatives. It is an adventure. Congratulations to Fiona Winning and her team and guests/artists. I saw DUAL on the Friday night. A piece of dance by Nalina Wait. This was a nicely conceived work. The…

In my review of Pacitti’s last offer CIVIL, as the opening performance in this festival of LIVEWORKS by the Performance Space at Carriageworks, I was being as “civil” as possible. I was, gently, in retrospect, being as politic as possible and therefore relatively generous about what I perceived as essentially a very bland and experientially dull and disappointing work. It was as the creator warned us in his program notes twelve years old. I gave it a respect for it had a sense of a past time and “history” and felt that it may serve as an introduction to the…

What a pleasure it is to go to the theatre and sit in a seat and have a wonderful piece of writing given to you as a reward for going. After the feebleness and the “slight” writing that we have recently been served up by The Sydney Theatre Company and other companies (notably, the Old Fitz this week: RADIO, the Upstairs Belvoir being a glorious exception: SCORCHED), it was a transcendent experience to be part of the Darlinghurst Theatre audience. This was not a chore of patience that one had to politely endure but an exciting, confronting and stimulating experience.…

If you want a conventional and old fashioned narrative monologue reasonably well acted (Andrew Bibby) and guided (Travis Green) and only about an hour long then this might be a way to spend your time and cash. This is a work from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 2006. It is written by an Englishman (Al Smith) about a young American youth living in the “centre” of the United States through the Space Race and the Kennedy Assassination to Vietnam performed by an Australian actor in 2008. It is a conventional (banal) straight forward writing technique that tells a story in a…

CIVIL was first created in 1996 as a five person piece but evolved into a solo work for the director Robert Pacitti which he then performed until 2003 when it the was re-committed to Richard Eton (Dicky). Richard Pacitti is a guest artist at the LIVEWORKS Festival for Performance Space over the next two weeks. He is creating with Australian Artists a project: FINALE which will be premiered next Friday the 5th of September for three performances. Richard Pacitti is the Artistic Director of Pacitti Company and creator of the SPILL Festival Of Performance-London’s premier biennale of experimental theatre and…

In the program notes there is the Bumming With Jane poem by Charles Bukowski and a quote from Doris Day. This play has all the inclinations of the middle class romantic fantastic fawning over the glamorous grunge of Bukowski but with a 9o% feel of the world of Doris Day in its bourgeois sentimentalities (Drunk is romantic. The life of the self disenfranchised is a positive experience especially if you have love to get you through. etc) (Crazy, because even though darling Doris is quoted as saying “The important thing in life is just loving and living.” she always had…