Noel and Gertie, a CDP production, Glen St Theatre, Sydney, May 25. The Removalists, Tamarama Rock Surfers, Bondi Pavilion, Sydney, May 29 NOEL Coward and Gertrude Lawrence met as child actors and immediately and lastingly took to one another. Sheridan Morley’s evocation of their bond, Noel and Gertie, was created in 1981 to be performed…
Category: Theatre
The Bull, the Moon and the Coronet of Stars
Merrigong Theatre Company, Wollongong, April 23 FOR a little piece – two-hander, 75 minutes, minimal set, few props – The Bull, the Moon and the Coronet of Stars gets a lot done. Like those traveller’s towels that mop up the lord knows how many times their weight in water, Van Badham’s new play has a…
Forget Me Not
Belvoir, Sydney, April 24. IT was all for the best, apparently, the practice of rounding up children and sending them as far away as possible to conditions of near slavery. Not being in any position to consent to the arrangement, the more than 3000 youngsters who came to Australia from the UK formed a second…
Fury, Stories I Want to Tell You in Person
Fury Sydney Theatre Company, Wharf 1, April 19 JOANNA Murray-Smith recently spoke on radio of the seductive power of argument, of recalling the sound of her parents and their friends talking passionately long into the night. Those long-evaporated murmurs are the wellspring of Fury, Murray-Smith’s absorbing new play. Alice (Sarah Peirse) is a neuroscientist at…
Dance Better at Parties
Sydney Theatre Company, April 9 DAVE would appear to have come to the wrong place. The ugly suburban dance school with its poo-brown floor and unforgiving fluoros offers private lessons in the rumba, tango, paso doble and other glittering ballroom arts. You buy a block of 10, sign here for direct debit, initial the injury…
Frankenstein
Ensemble Theatre, Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, April 3. FRANKENSTEIN is a name that despite one’s best efforts to resist brings forth mental images of freaks and bogeymen. Perhaps nothing quite as silly as a lurching giant with bolts through the neck, but something not quite human. Nick Dear’s over-weening scientist Victor Frankenstein is not this…
Bombshells
Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, March 20 “I’M so fucking happy,” screams Theresa McTerry, bride-to-be, slamming down the bubbles. It won’t be the first time she says that. Protesting a little too much, perhaps? Theresa’s monologue is the fourth of six that make up Bombshells, Joanna Murray Smith’s cunningly named piece about women in a state of…
Memoirs of a Showgirl
Slide, Sydney, March 7 SHAY Stafford is beautiful of course. There’s not a lot of call for showgirls who aren’t well above average in the face and figure stakes. She’s smart and funny too – an example of how life’s bounty can be quite unfairly distributed. But she worked very hard to get where she…
February wrap
A quick look at what February brought in the theatre in Sydney, and beyond … AT this year’s Perth International Arts Festival I was able to see, in one evening, the festival’s biggest and smallest pieces of theatre – The Threepenny Opera from the Berliner Ensemble, weighing in at about three hours and filling His…
Driving Miss Daisy
Theatre Royal, Sydney, March 2 ALFRED Uhry’s Driving Miss Daisy is a wisp of a play with matters of great substance at its heart. Boolie Werthan (Boyd Gaines) thinks his mother Daisy is no longer capable of driving safely and against her will hires Hoke Coleburn as her chauffeur. The year is 1948 and the…
deborah jones: FollowSpot 