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Parramatta Girls

Riverside Productions present PARRAMATTA GIRLS by Alana Valentine in the Lennox Theatre at the Riverside Theatres, Parramatta. PARRAMATTA GIRLS is an Australian play written in 2007 by Alana Valentine, and first performed at the the Belvoir Theatre, directed by Wesley Enoch. The play concerns eight inmates returning to an Institution for a reunion after some forty years. That the Institution was the now infamous Girls Training Centre (GTS) at Parramatta, and that the play was a sensation of revelation in 2007 that was timely and important and necessary (check out my observations of an Australian cultural favourite, DIMBOOLA), despite the…

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Transparency

  Presented by the Seymour Centre in association with Riverside Productions, TRANSPARENCY by Suzie Miller at the York Theatre, Seymour Centre. Suzie Miller won the 2008 National Kit Denton Fellowship for writing with courage for TRANSPARENCY. This is the play’s Australian Premiere, having, previously been seen in Belfast in a season at the Ransom Theatre Company. TRANSPARENCY tells the story of a man, Simon (Glenn Hazeldine) who is trying to live an honest life while forced, by his actions (assistant to a child murder) as a 10 year old child, to live under an assumed identity – to live with…

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The Modern International Dead

We have three Australians, one with a spiritual vocation, one with a scientific vocation and one a bewildered young man who likes adventures and joins the army. Each of them follow their instincts, and their fates unravel. Each are placed in a crucible with the intense “bunsen burner of life under them”, and each are melted down to their core. Each in their ravelling life thread are taken to places that stretch them into enduring feats that only the pure core of humanity can confront and survive. These ordinary people become true heroes of the modern international world. “This is…

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Shakespeare’s R & J

“In an exclusive boy’s boarding school, where students are forbidden to read Romeo and Juliet, four students put on a secret production of the play which brings violence, betrayal, lust, love and mortality into their own lives.” This is an all male Romeo and Juliet set in this particular location to capture the sense of “sexual hysteria” that Mr Calarco believes the Shakespeare play, is, in many ways about. The adapter Joe Calarco goes on to say in his notes to his text: “Put those boys in a school where Catholicism reigns, patriarchy rules, and where simply reading Shakespeare is…

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Codgers

  This is a new play that has been nurtured by the Riverside production arm called BREAKOUT. (Robert Love and Camilla Rountree). It had a workshop season at Riverside last year. The play is set in a suburban gymnasium where are group of old friends, CODGERS, meet, exercise, have a community sing in the sauna and then a follow up chin wag out on the terrace with a cup of coffee and home made savoury biscuits (cheese and chutney). The action of the play passes over several weeks. It is a two act conventionally constructed entertainment with a great deal…

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