Category: Mark Kilmurry

Photo by Prudence Upton Ensemble present NEVILLE’S ISLAND, by Tim Firth, at the Ensemble Theatre, McDougall St, Kirribilli. 29 June – 12 August. Four middle-aged men on a community/business bonding excursion are wrecked on the rocks of an island, are stranded and out of network contact. Each man with a hidden ‘psychic’ break lurking just below their consciousness, under the duress of this isolation and their relatively inept ability to adapt to the challenges, disintegrate into a bourgeois (and superficial) ‘Lord of the Flies’ scenario. The conceit of this work is that it is filtered through the ‘mask of comedy’ with…

Ensemble Theatre presents TWO, by Jim Cartwright, at the Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli. 24 March – 6 May. TWO is play by Jim Cartwright written in 1989. It is a play for two actors playing fourteen characters. TWO, like Mr Cartwright’s first and famous play, ROAD (1986), comes from his identity and personal ownership of the private dilemmas of his community, focusing on the marginalised and disenfranchised. He was born in Farnsworth, Lancashire, and has lived in that ‘Northern’ area all his life. TWO, reflects the Northern community coping with the government of Margaret Thatcher and its effects on local industry…

  Ensemble Theatre presents ODD MAN OUT, by David Williamson, at the Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli, 19 January – 18 March. ODD MAN OUT, is a new Australian play, by David Williamson. The play explores a relationship between Ryan (Justin Stewart Cotta), a ‘numbers’ genius employed and paid well by a Big Bank for his skills, who suffers from an undiagnosed case of Aspergers’ Syndrome and Alice (Lisa Gormley) a 38 year old physical therapist counting down her fertility clock with some urgency. We watch Ryan and Alice meet on a bus (what he is doing on bus, with all his…

Photo by Clare Hawley The Ensemble theatre presents, RELATIVELY SPEAKING, by Alan Ayckbourn, at the Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli, 18 November – 14 January, 2017. RELATIVELY SPEAKING, by Alan Ayckbourn, was his first big commercial hit, in1967. It had a cast that included Michael Hordern, Celia Johnson and introduced Richard Briers to the London West End. The play, originally called MEETING MY FATHER, came out of the ‘revolutionary’ era of the English Swinging Sixties with all its entertainment taboo explorations into drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll, – think of films such as TOM JONES (1963), THE KNACK, AND HOW TO…

  Ensemble Theatre presents BETRAYAL, by Harold Pinter, at the Ensemble Theatre, Kirribilli, 16 July – 20 August. BETRAYAL, by Harold Pinter was written in 1978, and belongs to his great middle period, and along with other works like NO MAN’S LAND (1975) and OLD TIMES , is often characterised as one of his ‘memory plays’. Pinter was given the Nobel prize for Literature in 2005. This play uses reverse chronology, and so the first scene of the play is the chronological end of the story, the last scene of the play is the first chronological event. It begins in a…

Arguably, five great classics of the repertory were promised this year in Sydney. The Bell Shakespeare presented HAMLET. The ANTIGONE at Belvoir. THE WOMEN OF TROY at the Sydney Theatre Company. The Ensemble Theatre as part of its celebratory 50th Anniversary Season offered DEATH OF A SALESMAN (Arthur Miller), and now the great German play Friedrich Schiller’s MARY STUART in a new version by Peter Oswald. This acclaimed version was premiered at the Donmar Warehouse in 2005. Peter Oswald is a verse dramatist himself and has written this new version in a mixture of prose and poetry. MARY STUART is…