Category: Rahel Romahn

Lewis (Sean Keenan) is a character creation of Louis Nowra that appears in three of his plays, SUMMER OF THE ALIENS (1992), COSI (1992) and THIS MUCH IS TRUE (2017). In COSI, Lewis takes on a job directing some patients of a local mental hospital in a ‘therapy’ production of Mozart’s COSI FAN TUTTI. This is not Lewis’ choice but one foisted on him by the thespian leader of the hospital patients, Roy (Robert Menzies), and his enthusiasm will not be brooked. The play charts the development of the rehearsals and first performance, hilarious in its ups-and-downs, as it negotiates the…

I had just finished my schooling in a traditional Catholic school and was investigating what ‘real’ life was like outside the indoctrinations of that institution, at Teacher’s College and University. I was only 16 turning 17 but even then I had become a cinema addict – escaping real life?, how immaturely ironic, eh? – and although my breeding, of late, was mostly school holiday Disney or Jerry Lewis comedies (except, of course, the free-to-air television repertoire), I took myself off to one of the ‘risqué’ Cinema Art Houses (The Savoy?) I had read about in The Daily Mirror, in Sydney,…