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Below is an extract from Daily Review contributor Rozanna Lilley’s new book Do Oysters Get Bored? A Curious Life (UWA Publishing, 2018) which, among other things, is about raising her son with autism and her relationship with her father, the poet Merv Lilley. In this chapter, Rozanna Lilley recalls her mother, the late, great playwright Dorothy Hewett and her enduring presence. ***
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Still Point Turning, which premiered at Wharf 1 Theatre on April 26, is a theatrical biopic charting the distinguished career and tumultuous inner life of Catherine McGregor, arguably Australia’s most famous transgender woman. The play opens in a hospital room. McGregor reads from her chart – ‘radical amputation of the penis’ and, with a bleak
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Bertolt Brecht called The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui a ‘parable play’ or Parabelstück. It was written in 1941 when he was in exile from Germany. Ui allegorises Hitler’s rise to power, recasting him as a grasping 1930s Chicago gangster, wreaking bloody havoc on the cauliflower trade as he establishes a monopoly that segues into a political career.
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Flight Paths, by Sydney playwright Julian Larnach, had its world premiere at the National Theatre of Parramatta on March 17. It is both original and ambitious. The play has a complex formal structure, with two interlocking stories, one set in Kenya and the other at Oxford University, and characters scattered, by birth and adoption, across
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Single Asian Female is a stylish theatrical soapie, tracing the lives of three Chinese women from one family as they negotiate the pitfalls of ethnic (dis)identification, sexuality and racial discrimination in a predominantly white, Australian patriarchal society. The head of the Wong family is Pearl, who moved from Hong Kong to Australia 30 years ago.
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