Category: Sarah Snook

Says Bernard Shaw in his Preface to the play of SAINT JOAN: Joan of Arc, a village girl from Vosges, was born about 1412; burnt for heresy, witchcraft, and sorcery in 1431; rehabilitated after a fashion in 1456; designated Venerable in 1904; declared Blessed in 1908; and finally canonised in 1920. She is the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages. Though a professed and most pious Catholic, and projector of a Crusade against the Husites, she was in fact one of the first Protestant martyrs. She…

Photo by Manuel Harlan The Old Vic presents THE MASTER BUILDER, by Henrik Ibsen. A new adaptation by David Hare, at The Old Vic, London, U.K. 23 Jan – 19 March, 2016. According to the Old Vic program notes, by Nick Curtis, on this production of Henrik Ibsen’s THE MASTER BUILDER: Today, (Ibsen) is the second most performed playwright in the world, after Shakespeare, and seen as the inheritor to Shakespeare’s mantle as a poetic explorer of the human condition. THE MASTER BUILDER is a play not often seen in Australia. Henrik Ibsen has, for me, three distinct phases in…

  Chester Productions and the Tamarama Rock Surfers present ROPE by Patrick Hamilton at the Bondi Pavilion Theatre. ROPE by Patrick Hamilton is a 1929 thriller, made memorably into a film by Alfred Hitchcock (1948). Although, Hamilton himself claimed it was nothing more than “a De Quincey-ish essay in the macabre” and it may have lost some of its flesh-creeping power, it can be ,if, done with meticulous style and respect a very good and maybe, thought provoking time in the theatre. In 2009, the Almeida Theatre in London revived it stylishly and it was uniformly received with enthusiastic response…

Two Birds One Stone and Griffin Independent present S-27 by Sarah Grochala at the SBW Stables Theatre. “S-27 won the inaugural Amnesty International Protect The Human Playwriting Award and was first produced at London’s Fin borough Theatre in June 2009.” Sarah Grochala “draws on prison records and interviews with the handful of survivors of Cambodia’s infamous Toul Sleng prison” run by the Khmer Rouge. 1.5 million of that country’s citizens between 1975 and 1979 were murdered. Hem En, the staff photographer at the Tool Slang prison, has had his story told in a documentary, THE CONSCIENCE OF NHEM EN, nominated…

  Spikey Red Things & Tamarama Rock Surfers present DNA by Dennis Kelly at the Old Fitzroy Hotel Theatre. DNA is the third play of Dennis Kelly that we have seen at the Old Fitzroy. (Different Company productions, however.) Debris (2004), and Love and Money (2006) being the others. DNA was first performed in the Cottesloe Auditorium of the National Theatre in February 2008. It was originally written for the National Theatre’s Connections project, which pairs young actors with new writing. Dennis Kelly says “it’s about a group of teenagers who do something very wrong, and then cover it up.”…