Theatre
Addiction is the third wheel in many a stage relationship. Plays such as Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956), J.P. Miller’s Days of Wine and Roses (1958), and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) examine the ways in which addiction – whether to alcohol, morphine, or even love – offers a heady sense of ‘something’ where once there seemed to be nothing at all.
... (read more)The setting is described in the program as a workplace at the end of the world – but what kind of workplace? Well, imagine that a multinational technology company has bought up Valhalla for warehouse space and a new fulfilment centre. Above and behind the stage is a kind of elongated portal through which we see billowing clouds, purple and pink, shot through with lightning.
... (read more)Anxiety and agitation failing to translate into action as an exhausted and exhausting world faces an uncertain future – the contemporary relevance of The Cherry Orchard requires no special pleading. Retaining the characters and narrative trajectory of the play written by Anton Chekhov in 1903, Australian director Benedict Andrews employs music and contemporary diction in an ambitious production that takes the humour in Chekhov’s final play seriously.
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