Category: Kim Hardwick

DEAD SKIN is a new play by a young playwright, 19 year old Laneikka Denne, and although the author declares, in her program notes, that the play is not auto-biographical, there is a vicissitude in the energy of the company, particularly, as the writer is also playing the leading character, Andie. It is that that makes this production a truly purgatorial experience as we witness so large a number of raw emotional crises. Andie, driven by the usual hormonal shiftings that go on in a young schoolgirl, has a passionate crush on her best friend at school, Maggie (Ruby Maishman), who…

WILD THINGS, is a new Australian play by veteran writer Suzanne Hawley. It is a story of four female friends in their sixties. They are war babies that aren’t boring old farts wearing twin-sets or pearls. Think Mick Jagger, The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Janis intruding into a time of innocence of no sex education and where the rest of the world was filtered through the lens of Empire Day and the singing of the rousing “There’ll always be an England”. Where the life choices for the working class girls at school were deemed either Domestic or Commercial – for the…

White Box Theatre and Seymour Centre present THE CAMPAIGN, by Campion Decent, in the Reginald Theatre, at the Seymour Centre, City Rd, Chippendale. February 11 – 28. THE CAMPAIGN, is a new Australian play from Campion Decent, commissioned by the Tasmanian Theatre Company, telling the history of the 9-year campaign for the human rights of the Gay and Lesbian community of Tasmania. THE CAMPAIGN is presented largely in a verbatim mode and based on interviews and research through the Parliament of Tasmania, the State Library of Tasmania, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. It is a meticulous 90-minute work loaded…

Photo by Clare Hawley Workhorse Theatre Company in association with bAKEHOUSE Theatre presents, THE WALWORTH FARCE, by Enda Walsh, at the Kings Cross Theatre (KXT), Kings Cross Hotel. 18th May – 9th June. “Excellently well done”, someone, I’m sure, says in some Shakespearean play. Someone else says, somewhere in Shakespeare, “As you like it”. THE WALWORTH FARCE is an Irish play of 2006, from Enda Walsh. His pedigree as a writer for the theatre and the screen is impeccable. We have seen some of the output in Sydney: DISCO PIGS (1997), NEW ELECTRIC BALLROOM (2008), PENELOPE, MISTERMAN and the musical ONCE, for…

Photo by Danielle Lyonne White Box Theatre and Seymour Centre presents, THE SHIFTING HEART, by Richard Beynon, in the Reginald Theatre, Seymour Centre, Chippendale. 8th March – 24th March. THE SHIFTING HEART is a revival production of an Australian play by Richard Beynon, premiered in 1957 in Sydney, that, then, under the sponsorship of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust, subsequently, toured the nation and had production in the London West End in 1959. This production is part of the Reginald Program supporting Independent Theatre. The play is part of the syllabus for NSW schools. Following the catastrophe of World War…

Photo by by Marnya Rothe Sport For Jove and the Seymour Centre present, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST, by Dale Wasserman, adapted from the novel by Ken Kesey, in the Reginald Theatre, Seymour Centre, Chippendale. August 3 – 19, 2017. ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST is best known as the Academy Award laden Milos Forman film, made in 1975, starring Jack Nicholson as Randle P. McMurphy and Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched. The essential core of the work is the battle between the Dionysian spirit with the formally controlled world that permits it to function for the supposed ‘greater…