Category: Griffin Theatre Company

Sydney Theatre Company and Griffin Theatre Company present CONCUSSION by Ross Mueller at Wharf 2 Theatre, Sydney.   CONCUSSION IS A VERY GOOD PLAY. It seemed to me to be a play about the World Concussed. We are shown six characters, some of them functioning in areas of social responsibility that were once (and maybe still are) Pillars of the Community: Doctor, Police Officer (detective), and then two more modern “pillars”: marketing consultants, a spin doctor and, sadly, a young representative of the future, “a male potential dropout.” This is a play where people have been given, in our present…

GRIFFIN THEATRE COMPANY present RANTERS THEATRE production of HOLIDAY by Raimondo Cortese at THE SBW STABLES THEATRE.   When we climb up to the performance space at the SBW Stables you find that the whole of the interior has been painted white. (Set design: Anna Trelogan) Stage floor and walls, auditorium walls and even the further steps into the seating banks. The whiteness is quite a visual shock. Instead of the usual masking black paint there is the nakedness of the white that emphasises all the ugly blemishes of every surface. The production has been showing for several weeks, when…

    Christmas and the New Year is hurtling towards us. Have the Holiday wishes from me. I thought I would go back over the year and list responses that left impressions upon me. I hope it leads to some ease of conversation for you. I feel that the possibility for good work in the performing Arts has most to do with the writing.The writer as “GOD”. So, that’s where I’ll begin. After drawing up a rough draft and some cogitation here we go. This is mostly in a chronological order of experience. THE SERPENT’S TEETH by Daniel Keene. Two…

  GRIFFIN THEATRE COMPANY and NOWYESNOW BY ARRANGEMENT WITH INSITE ARTS PRESENT TENDER by Nicki Bloom at the SBW Stables Theatre. This play was presented last year in the B Sharp Season 2007 . The creative team in all departments are the same, so there has been a year to let this work mature. It was remarkable then, it still is. This is a very exciting and interesting new Australian play and playwright. The experience of the play is much like a psychological thriller where the chronological order of the events have been jigsawed and sorted, you are invited in…

We have three Australians, one with a spiritual vocation, one with a scientific vocation and one a bewildered young man who likes adventures and joins the army. Each of them follow their instincts, and their fates unravel. Each are placed in a crucible with the intense “bunsen burner of life under them”, and each are melted down to their core. Each in their ravelling life thread are taken to places that stretch them into enduring feats that only the pure core of humanity can confront and survive. These ordinary people become true heroes of the modern international world. “This is…

On the coldest night in Sydney this winter, so far, with rain sprinkling around me, after almost two weeks of every night out at some theatre event, I had an uninspiring dinner grabbed between work and the theatre and then walked to the SBW Stables Theatre, bought my ticket and then climbed the stairs into that relatively uncomfortable space. I had recently written a series of reviews which were never entirely happy about what I had experienced. Mostly, lately, had begun to be irritated about Directors (both young and mature) conceptualising a production of a play and relatively obliterating the…