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The Seagull

VICTORY by Howard Barker was the last time that Judy Davis was on stage in Sydney. It was to see her that I bought my tickets to attend THE SEAGULL at Belvoir. To be able to watch Ms Davis on stage again, is too thrilling an opportunity to miss. A lot of other people have felt the same. The season was sold out – all but standing room – for weeks before the opening. Some of my friends bought their tickets despite the fact that it was another Chekhov play, the recent Sydney Theatre Company production of UNCLE VANYA having…

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Cut

Belvoir presents CUT by Duncan Graham in the Belvoir St. Downstairs Theatre. This is the third piece of writing by Duncan Graham that I have seen, in Sydney: OLLIE and the MINOTAUR (Downstairs Belvoir St, 2009) and ONE LONG NIGHT IN THE LAND OF NOD (Old Fitzroy,2009), being the other two. This production, CUT, is certainly the most satisfactory experience of this writer’s work that I have had. The artistic collaboration of all of the artists involved, have worked to create a fully rounded gem of performance art- a dramatic monologue. The space in which the actor, Anita Hegh, moves,…

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The Wild Duck

Belvoir presents THE WILD DUCK by Simon Stone with Chris Ryan after Henrik Ibsen in the Upstairs Theatre. THE WILD DUCK written by Simon Stone, also the Director, with Chris Ryan, after Henrik Ibsen’s play (1884) of the same name, is a new contemporary Australian play. This adaptation and re-writing, like Mr Stone’s other Ibsen inspired play (with Thomas Henning), THE ONLY CHILD (from Ibsen’s LITTLE EYOLF), as texts, presage a very good night in the theatre. Both of these texts are very interesting. This one better than the other, I felt. And while, if one is a committed Ibsenite,…

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Like a Fish Bone

Sydney Theatre Company and Griffin Theatre Company present LIKE A FISHBONE: An Argument and an Architectural Model by Anthony Weigh, at Wharf 1. LIKE A FISHBONE: An Argument and an Architectural Model, has The Architect (Marta Dusseldorp) with her Intern (Aimee Horne) about to take a model of their latest project to a presentation meeting to her commissioners when a strange woman, The Mother (Anita Hegh) arrives unexpectedly in the office. Thus we have the model. The Mother is (unaccountably) blind and wet (it is raining). She has been ‘visited’ and spoken to by her daughter, who was killed in…

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The City

  Photo – Belinda McClory – The City Sydney Theatre Company at Wharf 2 present THE CITY by Martin Crimp. Presented by arrangement with the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre. Maybe written as a companion piece to Mr Crimp’s play THE COUNTRY (2000), THE CITY (2008) concerns a young couple, Clair (Belinda McClory) and Christopher (Colin Moody) living in a city under the contemporary pressures of job insecurity, and the influence of a world full of war, torture and terrorism, of all kinds – close at hand and far away. It reveals a world of the fracturing…

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Beyond The Neck

  Photo: Beyond The Neck – Anita Hegh   B SHARP and BAMBINA BORRACHA productions present BEYOND THE NECK by Tom Holloway at the Belvoir St Downstairs Theatre. Last year the Griffin presented Tom Holloway’s DON’T SAY THE WORDS and I believed that this was a very exciting new writer for the Australian audience. This play BEYOND THE NECK confirms that impression. Mr Holloway is a Tasmanian and was 17 when the terrible shootings by Martin Bryant at Port Arthur happened. Ten years after the event in September, 2007 this play was presented in both Hobart and Launceston to great…

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