Category: David Bergman

PLAYING BEATIE BOW is a Young adult novel published by Ruth Park in 1980. Ruth Park died in 2010 at the age of 93. The book has had a staunch readership in its brief history and is a favourite for a few generations of young Australian readers. Both Kate Mulvany, the adapter of the novel for the theatre and the Director Kip Williams are two of those long affected readers, they declare in the program notes. I have never read the book even though I have had a long connection to most of Ruth Park’s work and so am discovering…

Rita Kalnejais is an Australian actor/writer (BABYTEETH), who now lives in London. FIRST LOVE IS THE REVOLUTION was written 5 years ago and had its premiere at the Soho Theatre, London. It originated, Ms Kalnejais writes in the program notes, when she was in a state of ‘culture shock’, encountering an English language that was so different from her natural Australian English, and in an amorous state with the foxes roaming the streets and backyards of the suburbs of London. Basti (Bardiya McKinnon) is a young adolescent, surviving a family of violent father, Simon (Matthew Whittet), and mentally ill mother,…

  Sydney Theatre Company presents The Wharf Revue – BACK TO BITE YOU, at Riverside Theatre, Parramatta. 31 August –  3 September. Then an extensive tour: Wollongong (6-!0 Sept.) Canberra (13-24 Sept.), Belrose (5-15 October), Sydney Wharf Theatre (18 Oct-23 December). The annual Wharf Revue, this time with the banner title: BACK TO BITE YOU, from the inimitable usual team, Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsythe and Phillip Scott with a guest artist, Katrina Ketallick opened last night at the Riverside Theatres out in Parramatta in its second tour stopover before arriving at the Wharf Theatre in Sydney, in late October. Skills…

Photo by Heidrun Lohr Monkey Baa presents, THE PEASANT PRINCE, by Eva Di Cesare, Sandie Eldridge and Tim McGarry, based on the children’s book, by Li Cunxin, illustrated by Anne Spudvilas, at the Lendlease Darling Quarter Theatre, Darling Harbour, 9-20 April. THE PEASANT PRINCE, is an adaptation, in book form of Li Cunxin’s MAO’S LAST DANCER, for children, and has served as the inspiration for the Monkey Baa Theatre Company to bring to life on the stage. It is a rudimentary ‘rags to riches’ story, of a kind of ‘fairytale’ journey of a young Chinese boy from a backwoods Chinese…