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Red Stitch Actors Theatre

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 

Red Stitch Actors' Theatre
by
20 November 2023

Since its sensational début on Broadway more than sixty years ago, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has become an enduring classic of the modern American canon. Its depiction of warring middle-aged couple Martha and George, and their drawing of young couple Honey and Nick into the gravitational field of the savage, alcohol-fuelled contretemps their marriage has become, remains a perennial favourite of the English-speaking theatre. Like moths, actors of a certain vintage are drawn to its bright flame, which shone never more brightly than in the superlative 1966 film adaptation directed by Mike Nichols, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the starring roles.

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Flake 

Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre
by
25 October 2023

Dan Lee’s first play, Bottomless, premièred at fortyfivedownstairs in 2018 after receiving the last R.E. Ross Trust award four years previously. Critics drew attention to the unusually star-studded cast for a début – Mark Coles Smith, Julie Forsyth, Jim Daly, Alex Menglet, Uncle Jack Charles – but its depiction of the residents of a dry-out facility in Broome garnered a mixed reception. The effect of Lee’s writing, wrote Tim Byrne typically, ‘may be unwieldy and overstuffed, but at least it feels rich. At least it has ambition.’ 

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Wittenoom 

Red Stitch Actors' Theatre
by
03 February 2023
The degazetted former township of Wittenoom, 1,420 kilometres north-north-east of Perth, stands like a dark shadow on the lungs of Australian mining, less an isolated blight than a synecdoche for the exploitation and avarice of the industry as a whole. It was named by Lang Hancock himself, created in 1947 by his company Australian Blue Asbestos Pty Ltd, and was directly responsible for the death of more than 2,000 people. It is a potent and ghostly setting for Mary Anne Butler’s play of the same name. ... (read more)

The Amateurs 

by
05 July 2022

It opens outside the tiny wooden box that is Red Stitch’s St Kilda home; the actors come towards us with torches blazing, in medieval masks. What follows is a brief pageant, a morality play that breaks down when one of the players falls victim to a mysterious pestilence – although it’s clear from the catch in the other actors’ voices that this contagion is not entirely unexpected. The actor drops, and his sister must be wrenched from his fallen body before she too succumbs. The plague is about, and all anyone can do is run.

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Heroes of the Fourth Turning 

by
28 March 2022

Not long into Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning a character brings out an acoustic guitar and is asked to play a song. He chooses Townes Van Zandt’s ‘Nothin’’, a melancholy ballad pulled from the annals of American folk music. When it was released in 1971, many assumed it represented Van Zandt’s struggle with drug addiction. In fact, as he explained two years before his death, the song was inspired by Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ, a novel banned by the Catholic Church in 1955 for representing a Christ figure prone to human fallibilities.

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Prayer Machine 

Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre
by
22 November 2021

A Buddhist prayer wheel is a cylinder stuffed with sacred mantras and set on a spindle. Turning the cylinder is supposed to produce the same benefit as chanting the texts aloud. For true believers, contemplation of the endless turning of the wheel can be an aid to meditation and a way of drawing nearer to enlightenment. In nineteenth-century Europe, however, the wheel – dismissed by missionaries as a prayer machine – became a popular symbol for the withering effects of technology on the soul: an image of a hand-held mechanical device elevated to the medium of spiritual agency.

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The Feather in the Web 

Red Stitch Actors' Theatre
by
04 February 2020

If alien life landed on Earth and we had to explain to them the habits of the white middleclass, it would be understandable if they thought we were insane. CrossFit looks like creative torture, leadership webinars are bizarre rituals in self-congratulation, and engagement parties lead to nothing but familial misery. Framed by the unrequited love story of a woman who can’t (or won’t) fit into polite society, Nick Coyle’s black comedy The Feather in the Web skewers the bourgeois obsession with career, status, and wellness.

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Oil 

Red Stitch Actors Theatre
by
18 November 2019

It is scary to contemplate a world without oil. Whether we acknowledge it or not, oil is at the heart of our everyday lives. The Western world has depended on it for over a century. It has given us heat, light, comfort, and control. But our modernity is built on a finite resource, and we are hurtling towards a time when we will be no more oil left to tap. What will happen then?

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