Category: Verity Hampson

  THE MYSTERY OF LOVE AND SEX, by Bathsheba Doran – a Darlinghurst Theatre Company Production, at the Eternity Theatre, Burton St, Darlinghurst. 10 February – 12 March. THE MYSTERY OF LOVE AND SEX, is an American play, the second of a trilogy of plays by Bathsheba Doran published under the title, THE MARRIAGE PLAYS. The first play is KIN; the third, PARENT’S EVENING. THE MYSTERY OF LOVE AND SEX, presents a modern ‘nuclear’ family: Howard (Nicholas Papademetriou), a successful crime fiction novelist who happens to be Jewish; his wife, Lucinda (Deborah Galanos) who once was Catholic (Christian); their daughter,…

Griffin Theatre Company presents A STRATEGIC PLAN, by Ross Mueller, in the SBW Stables Theatre, Kings Cross, 27 January – 11 March. A STRATEGIC PLAN is a new Australian play by Ross Mueller. Andrew (Justin Smith) is a rock ‘muso’ working in the industry for hire – session guitar etc: a gig with Powderfinger, for god’s sake! But he can’t play live any more: tinnitus, migraine… a health spiral is enveloping him. The art/craft of his passion can’t cover his financial responsibilities, and he wants to marry, so he applies and is recruited to take on a full time job…

Photo by Brett Boardman Belvoir presents, THE FAITH HEALER, by Brian Friel, in the Belvoir Upstairs Theatre, Belvoir St, Surry Hills, 26 October – 27 November. The lights faded to black. The play, THE FAITH HEALER, was finished. The stage lighting came back up and it was a kind of surprise, shock, wonder, when on the furniture-empty raised platform, surrounded by a panorama of painted tumultuous clouds, only three actors stood there to take the curtain call. Colin Friels, Alison Whyte and Pip Miller. They looked so few on that, what appeared to be now, very spare space. For in…

Belvoir in association with Oombarra productions present THE DROVER’S WIFE, by Leah Purcell, in the Upstairs Theatre, in the Belvoir St Theatre. 21 September – 16 October. THE DROVER’S WIFE by Leah Purcell, is a new Australian play. Henry Lawson’s short story, THE DROVER’S WIFE, was a reading that most of us of a certain generation had at school. Ms Purcell in her program notes tells us that it was a part of her growing up, a personal and familiar story shared with her by her mother, regularly, such that at the last line: I would stop her and say.…

Photo by Brett Boardman Belvoir presents, THE BLIND GIANT IS DANCING, by Stephen Sewell, in the Upstairs Theatre, Belvoir St Surry Hills, 17 February – 20 March. The primitive but stirring sound of a muted metal instrument (it, probably, a manufactured electric source) heralding the entrance of the participants to commence action on the Belvoir stage promised an heroic approach to this epic 1983, political/religious family saga, THE BLIND GIANT IS DANCING, by Stephen Sewell. I was flattered to be presented with the dense muscularity of the ideas in the language of the play – it has been so long since…

Photo by by Christine Chahoud The Goods Theatre Company in association with Red Line Productions presents, DROPPED, by Katy Warner, at the Old Fitz Theatre, Cathedral St Wooloomooloo. 8 December – 20 Decmber, 2015. DROPPED, is an Australian play first premiered in 2013, at the Melbourne Fringe Festival. Katy Warner, the Writer, was responding to the parliamentary decision to allow women to fight on the frontline. “The decision”, says the Director, Anthony Skuse, in his program notes: represented a significant shift; not only in terms of opportunities for women in the military, but more broadly, it challenged conventional notions of female…