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Theatre

Prima Facie 

Melbourne Theatre Company
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13 February 2023
Sheridan Harbridge as Tessa Ensler (photograph by Brett Boardman).
Since first being produced at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre in 2019, Suzie Miller’s play Prima Facie – a legal drama about consent and sexual violence – has become something of a phenomenon. Awarded Griffin Theatre’s playwriting prize in 2018, the subsequent production was enthusiastically received by audiences and critics alike. A 2022 West End production – propelled by the star power of Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer – garnered international acclaim, the National Theatre’s live screening of the production becoming one of 2022’s highest grossing British films. ... (read more)

Wittenoom 

Red Stitch Actors' Theatre
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03 February 2023
Emily Goddard in Wittenoom (photograph by Jodie Hutchinson).
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)

Amadeus 

Red Line Productions
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30 December 2022
Michael Sheen as Antonio Salieri in Amadeus (photograph by Sydney Opera House)
Amadeus is English playwright Peter Shaffer’s most resilient work. Antonio Salieri’s battle with both his god and his rival Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has been frequently performed and revived, with actors of the calibre of Paul Scofield, Ian McKellen, and David Suchet as Salieri, and Simon Callow, Tim Curry, and Michael Sheen as Mozart. It says a lot for the play’s durability that so much of its power and pertinence can survive a production as basically misguided as the one at present in the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House. ... (read more)

The Tempest 

Sydney Theatre Company
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05 December 2022
Richard Roxburgh as Prospero (photograph by Daniel Boud)
The Sydney Theatre Company’s staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, directed by Kip Williams, is centred around a large rock set on a revolving mechanism that assists with scene changes and helps to animate this rather static play about characters shipwrecked on a tropical island. The rock is reminiscent of the story of Prometheus, chained forever to a large rock by Zeus, but this is the ‘hard rock’ to which Caliban (the only character native to the island) is banished by the lordly Prospero, which reminds us that the island (and perhaps even the play) is Caliban’s domain. ... (read more)

Monsters 

Malthouse Theatre
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02 December 2022
Josie Weise, Alison Whyte, Samantha Hines in Monsters (photograph by Pia Johnson)
Is there any trope more ubiquitous to the horror genre than the jump scare? A sudden scream cuts through a loaded silence; a flitting shadow hosts a monstrous threat. It’s a trope often traced back to 1945’s Cat People. In the film, a scare comes in the form of an errant bus. Known as the ‘Lewton Bus’ after producer Val Lewton, the term is now a kind of genre shorthand, referring to a sequence that gleefully teases its audience with the possibility of an approaching shock. A character, face barely lit, walks down a dark street flinching at shadows. The sound of their rushed footsteps increase in volume and pace before the roar of a bus breaks the tension. Suspense results from the harmony between lighting, mise en scène and sound. We never see our monster, nor do we need to. A bus is scary enough. ... (read more)

'Emilia: A mock history of an Elizabethan poet' by Diane Stubbings 

Essential Theatre
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14 November 2022
Cessalee Stovall as Emilia (photography by Dylan Hornsby)

William Shakespeare is hiding behind a set of drapes. Wearing baggy black breeches, he is a buffoon, waggishly stalking his prey. His prey is Emilia Bassano, the young and (unusually for the times) educated daughter of a musician at the court of Elizabeth I, a woman who longs to be recognised for ‘how brilliant [her] mind is’. She wants to write and be published ...

RBG: Of Many, One 

Sydney Theatre Company
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07 November 2022
'RBG: Of Many, One: A hagiographic depiction of an American icon’s life' by Gabriella Edelstein
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933–2020), the late and great associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, was notoriously difficult to decipher. She was shy, enigmatic, and unused to clamour. Her career was distinguished by her sharp arguments and belief that due process – not reactivity – is the route to a fairer society. How, then, do you represent the interiority of a person who made herself inscrutable; understand why she made the choices she did? According to RBG: Of Many, One, the new play by Suzie Miller, author of the acclaimed Prima Facie, it is hidden emotion – a deep well of quieted outrage – that propelled Ginsburg’s life work. ... (read more)

Cyrano 

Melbourne Theatre Company
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30 September 2022
'Cyrano: A new adaptation of Edmond Rostand's Classic' by Tim Byrne

In Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), a handful of people enter a stage during a rehearsal and begin to break down the very structures of theatre itself. They question not just the verisimilitude of acting but the essentialism of character, the idea that we are ever any one thing fixed in time. It is a concept that animates Virginia Gay’s free adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897): this is a tragic hero who pushes at the confines of their assigned role, daring to imagine not just an alternate ending but an entirely new way of being Cyrano.

... (read more)

A Raisin in the Sun 

Sydney Theatre Company
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05 September 2022
Zahra Newman in the STC's 'A Raisin in the Sun'

In the annals of theatre history, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (which had its première in 1959, when she was only twenty-eight) will go down as the first Broadway play written by an African-American woman and directed by an African-American man. It would have been beaten a couple of seasons earlier by Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind if the redoubtable Childress had not refused to allow her would-be producers water down her work, which portrayed the demeaning and frustrating position of Black actors forced into endless ‘yes’m, no sir’ shuck and jive roles.

... (read more)

Anna K 

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18 August 2022
‘Anna K: An insipid new play from Suzie Miller’ by Diane Stubbings

Australian playwright Suzie Miller, a mainstay of independent stages both in Australia and overseas, is having something of a breakthrough year. Two of Miller’s play are having their mainstage premières – Anna K and RBG, Miller’s ode to American jurist Ruth Bader Ginsberg (Sydney Theatre Company, October–December) – and her Griffin-award-winning play Prima Facie (2019) has been a sell-out smash in London’s West End and broadcast around the world as part of the prestigious NT Live initiative of Britain’s National Theatre.

... (read more)
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