Category: Niklas Pajanti

  Company B presents BAGHDAD WEDDING written by Hassan Abdulrazzak at the Belvoir St Theatre. BAGHDAD WEDING is Hassan Abdulrazzak’s first play and it was first performed at Soho Theatre, London, in June 2007. Mr Abdulrazzak holds a PhD in Molecular Biology and works as a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College. He has, since this play, also worked for the Royal Court in translation of an Israeli play (603 by Imad Farajin) and is on attachment with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). I mention Mr Abdulrazzak’s background because part of the fascination of this text and production, for…

This play is the story of Yibiyung, a young Indigenous girl at the turn of the last century living in Western Australia under the increasing control of laws and policies concerning Indigenous affairs under a government appointed officer called the Chief Protector of Aborigines, who was made under the 1905 Aborigines Act “the legal guardian” of all “aboriginal” and “half caste” children up to the age of 16 years, enabling him to send any “aboriginal” and “half caste” child to an orphanage, mission, or industrial school, with or without the child’s parents’ permission. This story sounds very familiar. It should,…

From the Director’s Notes: “I put on classics as a means of expressing the timelessness of particular aspects of the human condition.” Further: “My job, as I see it, both in adaptation and direction is to strip away anything that gets in the way of this realization – anything that no longer speaks to us today – then build up a structure that facilitates the audience’s enjoyment and understanding of a piece that may in its original form have seemed antiquated” – Simon Stone The Set design (Adam Gardnir) consists of what I took to be 9 chicken coops/cages. In…

“The Pillowman” won the Lawrence Olivier Award for Best New Play after it was presented in London in 2003. It also was nominated for a Tony Award in 2005 in New York. On this outing I don’t think it will be similarly nominated in any such category in the Sydney Theatre Awards. The play is the same but clearly the production is not. This is the painful risk the playwright must take in the collaborative minefield of the Theatre. This play is set in a Totalitarian State somewhere, sometime. When it was done in 2003 and in 2005 in London…