Category: Geoff Morrell

Photo by Brett Boardman Belvoir presents THE GREAT FIRE, by Kit Brookman, in the Upstairs Theatre, Belvoir St Theatre, Surry Hills, 6 April – 8 May. I saw this production weeks ago, towards the end of its run. My impression of the play was that of an ambitious but lumbering four-act play in the mode of Chekhov. It reminded me, mostly, in Australian terms, of Alex Buzo’s BIG RIVER (1985) – another big family saga, set in a big rambling house on the Murrumbidgee/Murray River basin, based on the history of the writer’s own family but set toward the end of…

Sydney Theatre Company presents a Sydney Theatre Company and State Theatre Company of South Australia production of VERE [FAITH] by John Doyle in the Drama Theatre at the Sydney Opera House. VERE [FAITH] is John Doyle’s second play, THE PIG IRON PEOPLE, which the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) presented in 2008, being the first. Says Andrew Upton, the Artistic Director of the STC: John Doyle … has shaped a play that finds the intersection between theatre, science and morality. The here and now of the stage, the four-dimensional fields and particles of physics, the slippages and illusions of dementia. It…

Photo: Toby Schmitz – Ruben Guthrie Company B present RUBEN GUTHRIE by Brendan Cowell at the Belvoir Theatre. Presented last year as part of the B Sharp Season Downstairs this play has had some re-working, new writing and some re-casting. Wayne Blair’s production has got deeper, darker and more pertinent. Alcoholism and addiction is the thematic subject. In my own neighbourhoods of suburban Sydney and the inner city, the cultural trauma of alcohol abuse, (binge drinking, just one of the symptoms) is almost unavoidable. The consequences both individually and in the wider community are ugly and on the edge of…

  Sydney Theatre Company and Medina Apartment Hotels present RABBIT by Nina Raine at Wharf 1. This British play was written and first performed in London 2006 “for which Nina Raine won both London Standard and Critic’s Circle Awards for Most Promising Playwright”. Ms Raine recently expressed surprise that her “little” play has had such a big life. For it also has had a showing in an Off Broadway house in New York in 2007, and in New Zealand. The play is not really covering any new ground (What play can?) except it is covering a contemporary Generation Y in…