Category: Steve Francis

  Griffin Theatre Company present World Premiere of STRANGE ATTRACTOR by Sue Smith at the SBW Stables Theatre, Sydney. This play is set “in a railway construction camp….. inland from Port Hedland, Western Australia in the “wet mess” – a featureless space with tables and a bar. The working personnel wear identical uniforms covered “in the red dust of the desert.” (Design by Jo Briscoe. Lighting by Bernie Tan. Sound Designer and Composer, Steve Francis). The play’s action is told in one act, 17 scenes, and uses a simple split time mechanism (the present and a few weeks ago) to…

Photo: Toby Schmitz – Ruben Guthrie Company B present RUBEN GUTHRIE by Brendan Cowell at the Belvoir Theatre. Presented last year as part of the B Sharp Season Downstairs this play has had some re-working, new writing and some re-casting. Wayne Blair’s production has got deeper, darker and more pertinent. Alcoholism and addiction is the thematic subject. In my own neighbourhoods of suburban Sydney and the inner city, the cultural trauma of alcohol abuse, (binge drinking, just one of the symptoms) is almost unavoidable. The consequences both individually and in the wider community are ugly and on the edge of…

  Sydney Theatre Company and Medina Apartment Hotels present RABBIT by Nina Raine at Wharf 1. This British play was written and first performed in London 2006 “for which Nina Raine won both London Standard and Critic’s Circle Awards for Most Promising Playwright”. Ms Raine recently expressed surprise that her “little” play has had such a big life. For it also has had a showing in an Off Broadway house in New York in 2007, and in New Zealand. The play is not really covering any new ground (What play can?) except it is covering a contemporary Generation Y in…

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,…