Reviews Archive

This is a play about ego and ambition, ignorance and fear. It is a story of corruption, deception, ignorance and fear. But also, friendships. And there are jokes, too. These aren’t my words – they are spoken by the actor Jamie Oxenbould …

Di Smith is not new to the Australian public. Fans know her well from her role as Dr Alex Fraser in the long-running TV series A Country Practice, Australian cinema, Charlie and Boots and Emoh Ruo, Muriel’s Wedding, Puberty Blues and most recently, her …

Walking into WildThingProduction’s Seventeen at the Seymour Centre, we were instantly taken back to high school. The stage had been covered in AstroTurf. There was a broken swing-set, a graffitied table and even a bubbler, small details designed to spark our own …

  Acknowledging the inevitability of death seems to be all the rage at the moment, what with the TV series Swedish Death Cleaning and Ray Martin considering his burial/funeral options on his three-part doco on the ABC, but British playwright Laura Wade’s …

Melanie Tait’s new play is a comedy drama centred on Marion ‘Crawfie’ Crawford, the dedicated nanny/governess to the two little girls who would become better known to the world as Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret. Those who have an inkling of …

This production of Gaslight is a beautifully polished work that keeps audiences guessing – no mean feat for period drama. In their clever adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play, Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson have kept the nuances of Victorian Gothic but …

What a lively and sparkling adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya this is. Joanna Murray-Smith has brought out the comedy in this tale of lives blighted by disillusionment and ennui without losing the melancholy underlying the tale. Her contemporary dialogue is so easy …

Neil Simon wrote this wonderful comedy in 1965, and if it were a novel that would make it ‘historical’ fiction. As a play perhaps it is a period piece? Whatever, because it is about human idiosyncrasy it remains, under the direction of …

  An epic play and an epic performance from Robert Menzies as the cantankerous, incredulous and increasingly befuddled old monarch who loses his grip on his mind as he gives away his kingdom. The play was first performed in 1606, in the …

Billed as an ‘explosive homage to legendary opera singer Maria Callas’, Terrence McNally’s 1995 opera play opens with Lucia Mastrontone (in the principal role) conducting a masterclass in New York’s Juillard School of the Arts. Her Callas, now past her prime as …