Category: Stage

The Great Tamer is one of those unique festival works that will be talked about for years to come, writes Humphrey Bower from the Perth Festival. As has often been noted, the Greek experimental theatre director Dimitris Papaioannou began his professional life as a visual artist. As such he belongs to the tradition of theatre

Bitchy queens and their unruly courts are quite the flavour of the month, aren’t they? There’s big screen Oscars pick The Favourite with Queen Anne and her scheming same-sex suitors. Princess Margaret is proving quite the handful on Netflix’s The Crown. Meghan (Markle) and Kate (Middleton) are at each other’s throats, if you believe the

It sure smells like teen spirit on this AstroTurf. Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves takes hormonal adolescent minutiae and sits it right next to Cambodian dictators in a play tracing the trials and triumphs of a girls’ indoor soccer team in self-described middle America.  DeLappe’s play premiered off-Broadway and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

Is it too early to say: ‘if you only see one play this year, make it this one?’ Okay. In order of appearance: THE DESIGN: (set, Stephen Curtis; costume, Chloe Greaves) is genius, an act of conjuration that cuts through the usual theatrical delineation of ‘us’ and ‘them’, by the simple expedient of making the

The smell is sweet with urine only a minor component. The prevalent odour suggesting the inside of someone’s ear. Dank clothes are there too, wet wool and onions, which she eats raw. And for me, what has always been the essence of poverty; damp newspaper. If the thought of Miriam Margolyes rocking up in an old yellow van

Night is falling. A woman, a slave, frantic with fear, eases an old barn door open and looks inside. The place is deserted; her relief a prayer. She slips through the door: safe haven. Respite. She bites into the apple she’s had hidden in her skirts (more on those skirts later…). Then: a sudden noise

Here is a good play with a contradictorily bad title, in a starry production by Darlinghurst Theatre that approaches very good. Little Voice, of course, is nothing of the sort. It’s the name her muzzling mum Mari has enforced upon her. In the privacy of her room it’s a very big voice indeed. Possessed by