Performing Arts Reviews:
2008–2022

Photo by Alexandra Nell Lambert House Enterprises, developed with the assistance of Playwriting Australia (PWA) present FLOOD, by Chris Isaacs, at the Old 505, Eliza Street, Newtown, 9 November – 19 November. FLOOD, by Chris Isaacs, is an Australian play first presented in Perth, in 2014. Six young white youths, three women and three men, take off for a camping break out in the wilds of Western Australia. Just driving without a clear mapping identity they find themselves kind of lost and end up setting up camp beside a pool, having disregarded a signpost laying in the dust. Bush noises, kangaroos,…

Sydney Theatre Company presents A FLEA IN HER EAR, by Georges Feydeau, in a new adaptation by Andrew Upton, in the Drama Theatre at the Sydney Opera House, 31 October – 17 December. A FLEA IN HER EAR (La Puce a L’Oreille) was written by Georges Feydeau, in 1907. Feydeau is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the theatre form that we know as farce. Comedy is the hardest form of theatre to solve, I reckon, and farce is the most formidable. It requires a verbal precision that must be matched with an equally adept physical precision. It…

Photo by Daniel Boud Bell Shakespeare presents, OTHELLO, by William Shakespeare, in the Playhouse, at the Sydney Opera House, 24 October – 4 December. OTHELLO is a riveting play. A play concerning the plot of a man who outwardly seems a charming man – a flower external that has a serpent beneath. Of a man who has no conscience at all. A man who takes the witnessing audience into his confidence and shows us a duplicity so heinous, wicked and clever that we cannot look away. It is Iago and we step willingly onto the roller-coaster of his doings and…

Photo by Brett Broardman Griffin Theatre Company presents, THE TURQUOISE ELEPHANT, by Stephen Carleton, in the SBW Stables Theatre, Kings Cross, 14 October – 26 November. THE TURQUOISE ELEPHANT by Stephen Carleton, says the back of the Currency Press play/program publication, is a ‘shockingly black, black, black political farce’ about Climate Change, which won the 2015 Griffin Theatre Award. According to Yuval Noah Harai, the author of HOMO DEUS, Humankind has locked itself into a double race. We champion and feel compelled to speed up the pace of scientific progress and economic growth while also staying one leap ahead of…

Photo by Clare Hawley The Ensemble Theatre presents, e-baby, by Jane Cafarella, at the Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli, 13 October – 13 November. e-baby is a new Australian play by Jane Cafarella, for two women, seen first in Melbourne, last year. The play charts a surrogacy pregnancy. We first meet Catherine (Danielle Carter), a 46 year-old, ex-pat Australian, living the ‘dream’ as a high-flying lawyer based in London, with a practice in New York, who after trying with her architect husband for eleven years to have a child through IVF treatment and failing, decides that her need to have a child of…

Photo by Clare Hawley Mophead Productions in association with Red Line Productions present, THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, translated by David Tushingham, at the Old Fitz Theatre, Cathedral St, Wooloomooloo. 11 October – 12 November. The writer of THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, made 40 feature length films, 2 Television film series, 3 short films, 4 video productions, 24 stage plays and 4 radio plays, and gave 36 acting roles in his own and others’ films. He worked as well as author, cameraman, composer, designer, editor and theatre manager.…