Theatre

Lucy Kirkwood, the present darling of the British critics, is a playwright who is not afraid of tackling momentous subjects. Her most recent play, The Children (2016), is a post-nuclear apocalyptic chamber piece which explores the responsibility of the baby boomer generation to those who ...

The stage is open – a glossy art deco drawing room with plush velvet chairs and a chaise longue, cocktail glasses, and champagne, ready for a party. An engaging young man, dressed formally in a three-piece suit steps onstage and begins the famous speech: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent ...

Rarely has the opening night of a play been so closely linked to a news cycle. A press story on 23 February reported that the Australian government is being sued for AU$103 million in a Jakarta class action. The plaintiffs, one hundred and fifteen Indonesian men, were teenage boys when they ...

Away reached the dubious status of ‘Australian Classic’ in a remarkably short period of time. It has become so ubiquitous that I would hazard a guess that fully two thirds of the Australian audience for this production who are under thirty will have been involved with the play either as performers ...

What a mysterious and delightful play is American playwright Annie Baker’s John (2015), a meditative comic drama full of exquisite detail and suggested psychological insights. Sarah Goodes directs with sensitivity and imagination for the Melbourne Theatre Company, in the Fairfax ...

It is often described as the world’s largest social experiment, whatever that means. In 1979, to curb the baby boom that followed the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese government officially adopted a one-child policy. Thirty-six-years later, in late 2015, this severe program, which allowed ...

Little wonder that fortyfivedownstairs is encoring Marguerite Duras’s brilliantly dialectical play L’amante anglaise, first presented in this production at La Mama Theatre in 2014, directed by Laurence Strangio. Duras wrote it first as a novella fifty years ago; the stage adaptation followed in 1968 ...

It was a job worthy of William himself: not only the ambitious scale of the project, but the speed with which it was completed. In just seven years, between 1958 and 1964, Argo Records, with the Marlowe Dramatic Society, released the complete works of Shakespeare in forty box-set LPs ...

The opening scene of the The Testament of Mary sets the tone of this excellent production and dramatises brilliantly Colm Tóibín’s radical reassessment of Mary as the Mother of God. Elizabeth Gadsby’s dark marble set, bordered by a red velvet rope, holds one empty chair, one ...

It was in early 1974, while Harold Pinter was in America and working on a screen adaption of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, that the originating image of No Man’s Land occurred to him