Category: Renee Mulder

I thought, as I sat in the Roslyn Packer Theatre on the Opening Night that GRAND HORIZONS, has a set of characters mirroring the highly successful 9 seasons, 210 episodes, television sitcom, EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND (1996-2005 : two elder parents who are abusive and abused – in our case 80 year old Nancy (Linda Cropper) and husband Bill (John Bell), two competitive brothers – in our case married, harried Ben (Johnny Nasser) and hysteric gay son Brian (Guy Simon), and a wife – in our case a very pregnant, patient one called Jess (Zindzi Okenyo). The play has two guest…

DOGGED, by Andrea James and Catherine Ryan, directed by Declan Greene, is a new Australian play. It is set in the 1840’s during the colonisation with sheep farmers in the electorate that became McMillan, up in the Alpine district that we know today as Monash, but is Gunaikurnai land. DOGGED is an Australian Gothic tale of a white farm daughter (Blazey Best) with her dog (Anthony Yangoyan) scrambling in the primitive bush for a living and engaging with a Mother Dingo (Sandy Greenwood), in search of her “little ones”, her lost pups. It is a bleak unforgiving land realised in…

PLAYING BEATIE BOW is a Young adult novel published by Ruth Park in 1980. Ruth Park died in 2010 at the age of 93. The book has had a staunch readership in its brief history and is a favourite for a few generations of young Australian readers. Both Kate Mulvany, the adapter of the novel for the theatre and the Director Kip Williams are two of those long affected readers, they declare in the program notes. I have never read the book even though I have had a long connection to most of Ruth Park’s work and so am discovering…

PRIME FACIE, is a one hundred-minute, one person play, by Suzie Miller. It won the Griffin Award for Best Play in 2018. Tessa is a feisty young woman from a working class background who finds her talent in the practice of Law. In the journey of this play Tessa experiences what it is to be on both sides of the incidents of the court system. It becomes a devastating revelation. Suzie Miller is a writer who has practised in Law to subsidise her first love: writing. Many a writer, especially the Australian writer, with this country’s limited opportunities to be…

Photo by Brett Boardman Griffin Theatre Company and Queensland Theatre present, RICE, by Michele Lee, in the SBW Stables Theatre, Kings Cross. 26th July – 26th August. RICE is a new Australian play, by Asian-Australian writer, Michele Lee. It received the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award 2016-2017, and this production was first presented by Queensland Theatre in the Billie Brown Studio, in June, Directed by Lee Lewis. Michele Lee has been working around the edges of the mainstream theatres for many years, and this is the first major mounting of one of her works. Nisha (Kristy Best), the Australian-born grand-daughter of…

Photo by Prudence Upton Sydney Theatre Company and Allens present, BLACK IS THE NEW WHITE, by Nakkiah Lui. At Wharf 1, Hickson Rd., Walsh Bay. 10 May – 17 June. Nakkiah Lui has written two previous texts THIS HEAVEN and KILL THE MESSENGER, for the Belvoir St Theatre – both ending tragically, doused in bubbling political ‘anger’ – dealing with cultural trauma and death. For this Sydney Theatre Company (STC) commission Ms Lui tells us in her program conversation: This time, I wanted to write something that didn’t come from a place of sorrow or from oppression where the actors would have…