Performing Arts Reviews:
2008–2022

STOP GIRL, is a new Australian play, by a Wakley-award winning journalist for the Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC), Sally Sara. It is her first play and it tackles the story of Suzie who is a journalist working in the world conflict hot spots of Afghanistan, Iraq etc. Suzie could be a doppelgänger of the writer. On a Set by Robert Cousins, that is virtually an open space with ‘symbolic’ objects that serve the utilitarian requirements of the action of the 90-minute play without interval, has on the back wall a large screen that facilitates video support for showing images of…

IS THERE SOMETHING WRONG WITH THAT LADY? is a single person, 90 minute  monologue. Debra Oswald an Australian writer of ‘plays’ for the Theatre, Television, Film and Radio. She is also a Novelist. Born in 1959. In a funny and excruciatingly honest one-woman show, Debra tells stories about her neurotic childhood, clumsy romantic history, and the anxieties and joys of the writer’s life – all in the hope that the audience can help her work out that ever-important question: what comes next? … (from the publicity blurb). This elder Australian writer appears on stage in a simple costume of warm…

DEAD SKIN is a new play by a young playwright, 19 year old Laneikka Denne, and although the author declares, in her program notes, that the play is not auto-biographical, there is a vicissitude in the energy of the company, particularly, as the writer is also playing the leading character, Andie. It is that that makes this production a truly purgatorial experience as we witness so large a number of raw emotional crises. Andie, driven by the usual hormonal shiftings that go on in a young schoolgirl, has a passionate crush on her best friend at school, Maggie (Ruby Maishman), who…

   FROZEN, the Touring version of the Broadway Musical opened in Sydney at the Capitol Theatre just after the opening of PIPPIN at the Lyric Theatre. These two big musicals showing the way to the re-opening of the BIG theatres in the time of the Covid 19 Pandemic. Heroic and Hopeful. The audience I sat with were an excited collection of fans of the Musical primed for the show, armed with their knowledge of the two FROZEN films, I supposed, for, whenever a song came or an interaction between characters, there was a sensation of emotional identification that had…

YOU’RE NOT SPECIAL, is a new Australian work by Sam O’Sullivan, Directed by Samantha Young. This play follows up from Mr O’Sullivan’s play THE BLOCK UNIVERSE. Both these plays have proved to be very interesting experiences and are exciting as Mr O’Sullivan’s playwriting skills have grown promisingly from exposure to exposure. YOU’RE NOT SPECIAL, introduces us to a couple Dan (Akira Ashraf) and Ellie (Kate Skinner), who have set up an apartment. Ellie has found a client who has her working digitally on-line, which gathers a demand with increasing pressure as the play moves through time. Dan, in the meantime,…

WILD THINGS, is a new Australian play by veteran writer Suzanne Hawley. It is a story of four female friends in their sixties. They are war babies that aren’t boring old farts wearing twin-sets or pearls. Think Mick Jagger, The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Janis intruding into a time of innocence of no sex education and where the rest of the world was filtered through the lens of Empire Day and the singing of the rousing “There’ll always be an England”. Where the life choices for the working class girls at school were deemed either Domestic or Commercial – for the…