Category: Belvoir

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…

Writer, Anchuli Felicia King, and Director, Bonita de Wit, two young Australians, both found themselves studying in the Performance Arts Program at Columbia University in New York (not that they hadn’t tried to find a place in Australian schools to do just that – their resourcefulness in finding the alternative way to training seems to have forged some strong ‘gifts’, despite, I imagine, the great expense). Their respective American friends at school made sure they became acquainted and diffidently, at first, i’ve been told, they did. Great! One result is SLAUGHTERHOUSE, a new play by Ms King which is being…

LIFE OF GALILEO, by Bertolt Brecht has been adapted by Tom Wright for this present Belvoir Theatre production. My introduction to the Galileo play was through the British translation into English by John Willlett. It was this that I first read as an acting student years ago, and re-read before seeing this production, along with the translation that Brecht had worked with the actor Charles Laughton that premiered in Los Angeles in 1947. Brecht had exiled himself from Nazi Germany with the rise to power of Adolph Hitler, and while in Switzerland began working on this play between 1937-39, it…

THINGS I KNOW TO BE TRUE, has gathered a critical and word-of-mouth reputation. Such, that I was urged to see the play. I did last Friday night. Afterwards, I was just kind of angry, angry that such a great piece of writing had been so bowdlerised in production. Andrew Bovell’s play, for me, Australia’s leading playwright, is a wonderfully perceptive and astringent overview of the Australian Family and the different readings a six unit family have in practising and understanding what Love is within the spread and influence of relentless Time. Dad, Bob (Tony Martin) and mum, Fran (Helen Thomson)…

Photo by Pia Johnson Belvoir and Malthouse Theatre present, BLISS, by Peter Carey, adapted for the stage, by Tom Wright in the Upstairs Belvoir Theatre, Surry Hills. 9 June – 15 July. BLISS, is an ‘old’ Australian novel, by Peter Carey. It is his first novel – 1981 – adapted for the stage by Tom Wright. BLISS, the novel, has also been re-incarnated as a film, adapted by Ray Lawrence (the Director) in association with Peter Carey in 1985, and also as an Opera, music by Brett Dean with a libretto by Amanda Holden, in 2010. The novel is a…

Photo by Daniel Boud Belvoir presents a La Boite Theatre Company production SINGLE ASIAN FEMALE, by Michelle Law, in the Upstairs Belvoir Theatre, Belvoir St Surry Hills. 16 February – 25 March. SINGLE ASIAN FEMALE, by Michelle Law, was first produced, after being commissioned, by the La Boîte Theatre Company, in Brisbane, in 2017, and has been revived for this Sydney season at the invitation of the Belvoir Company. The work was developed with the assistance of the Lotus Playwriting Project, an initiative of Playwriting Australia and Contemporary Asian Australian Performance (formerly Performance 4a). A family of females have been abandoned…