Performing Arts Reviews:
2008–2022

One of my favourite series of Crime novels are those by Canadian/American Katherine V. Forest, with her Kate Delafield Mystery series. Kate Delafield is an ex-marine employed as a Detective in the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). I came across this series of books last year and was fortunate to read them in chronological order, or at least six of them: AMBER CITY (1984), MURDER AT THE NIGHTWOOD BAR (1987), THE BEVERLY MALIBU (1989), MURDER BY TRADITION (1991), LIBERTY SQUARE (1996) and APPARTITION ALLEY (1997). What is fascinating is that not only is each book deeply involved in the solving…

Hello. Besides the literary books of ‘weight’ – fiction and non-fiction – I have distracted myself with some relatively lightweight reads. “A Rising Man” and “A Necessary  Evil”, by Abir Mukherjee Recommended by a bookshop owner friend I embarked into the detective genre. Abir Mukherjee is the son of immigrants from India and grew up in West Scotland and now lives in London. His debut novel A RISING MAN appeared in 2016. We meet Sam Wyndham, a World War I veteran and Scotland Yard refugee, who takes on a job offer in Calcutta in 1919. A rising man belonging to…

Theatre and Cinema closed. Reading is able to be done. So here is a response to one of the recent reads. Norah is an Irish writer of 5 novels and is 58 – the same age that her mother, Katherine O’Dell, an actress of international fame – both of the theatre and cinema, particularly Theatre – died. Died after a long depression, an accident with a gun and a descent into ‘madness’. An academic is writing her Phd on the life of Katherine and is interviewing Norah to get some insight into her subject. Norah becomes disturbed as she observes…

I was especially keen to see this play, mostly because of the writer and his growing reputation as a force in contemporary American playwriting. AN OCTOROON – 2014 (seen in Brisbane. Needs to be seen in Sydney), APPROPRIATE – 2014 (again unseen), and GLORIA – 2018, which we saw last year at the Seymour Centre. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a subversive writer with a tremendous sense of comedy and balanced political/social critique – he is kind of fearless. EVERYBODY – 2018 – is based on the 15th Century medieval mystery play – EVERYMAN. It tells of the Everyman who is summoned by…

CUSP is a new work by Mary Anne Butler. It has taken three years of discussion, development and rehearsal which included two weeks of that development – one week in Darwin and another in Sydney – with the writer, director and actors to find manifestation in a theatre. It is a quasi-poetic play that uses an abundance of ‘lists’ to achieve this – true to our Elizabethan and Jacobean forebears and their example. We meet three actors playing three young Northern Territorians at the cusp of having their life cycles moving from the teenage metamorphic to the young adult evolution.…

DISTORTED is the latest play from Australian writer, Xavier Coy, whose other plays BURIED and ARE YOU LISTENING NOW? I have seen, both at the OLD 505. Mr Coy’s writing has always intrigued, provoked and excited me. This work is 90 minutes long with no interval and charts ten characters in a journey-arc to depression. Mr Coy is exploring Mental Health. Director Richard Hilliar with Mr Coy and his actors have ‘workshopped’ the original collection of independent people into a text to reveal definite characters with individual narratives, all existing in the same world but not at all connected to each other.…