Theatre Archive

With its high-octane energy and first-rate balletic dancing this Opera Australia production of West Side Story draws the audience in straight away. The cast is youthful, as befits a couple of warring street gangs in 1950s New York, too young and too …

In William Golding’s 1954 novel, a group of British schoolboys, aged from about six years to pre-adolescence, crash-land onto a tropical island. There are no adult survivors, no other inhabitants and the boys have to learn to to fend for themselves. Ralph …

Science versus reason. Dogmatism versus the church. Innovative thinking versus big business. Science versus big business. Time moves on, but doesn’t change things that much as Tom Wright’s fresh and contemporised adaptation of Brecht’s Life of Galileo shows. The play follows the …

Angry. Impassioned. Raw. Intense. Meyne Wyatt’s part-autobiographical City of Gold is all of these things, and more. Barely disguised as the play’s main character, 20-something actor and Wongi man Breythe, this is Wyatt’s  yell of rage and pain about what it is …

It is rare and wonderful to find theatre as powerful and engrossing as this pared-down and passionate production of Arthur Miller’s classic. It is mesmerising from start to finish. Set in the 1950s in Brooklyn’s docklands, it is an explosive family drama that …

The Torrents is a vignette of an Australia of yesteryear, even the sepia-coloured tones of Renee Mulder’s wonderful and detailed set seem redolent of an old photograph. It has an interesting history. Director Clare Watson describes it as the “one that got …

25 August 1944. Only a handful of people knew it, but Paris was about to be razed, its nearly 2 million inhabitants annihilated. Hitler was out for yet more vengeance; if he couldn’t have Paris – and the Allied troops were at …

Trevor has tasted potential stardom – he appeared in a pilot with a celebrity called Morgan Fairchild – and now, as an adult actor, he is hungry for fame. All he needs is a break, right? Mom Sandra is his greatest supporter. …

Engrossing from start to finish, this dream team combo or writer Andrew Bovell and director Neil Armfield – plus an excellent cast – is a must-see. It’s about family. An ‘ordinary’ family. One most of us can relate to. What they will …

  Murder on the Wireless is a huge serve of nostalgia, harking back to the days when entertainment came via the radio and aural plays were the thing. A few lucky people had black and white TV – certainly not colour – …