This year will mark five years since the Australian Marriage Postal Survey in which the government took a plebiscite of all Australian citizens to gauge support of legalising same-sex marriage. It was a deeply traumatic time for the LGBTQIA+ community as the debate of their rights was put on a national stage and explicitly inserted into their everyday interactions with neighbours, coworkers, and family.
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The prolific writer Jeffrey Archer is most well-known for his crime novels and, perhaps, for those novels keeping his head above water while battling numerous criminal trials not unlike the ones he writes. Beyond Reasonable Doubt is one of his three stage plays and it sits firmly within his oeuvre as a court drama dealing out justice for murder.
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It is painfully ironic, or perhaps just painfully familiar, that not two weeks out from the kick-off of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, the Australian government was debating whether or not to legalise discriminating against trans people in schools. It was a pertinent, if backwards, reminder of the way LGBTQIA+ people’s lives are violently shaped by systemic oppression and unfeeling legislation. Breaking the Code demonstrates how very little can protect someone from legalised bigotry.
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Apps like Tinder and Bumble and Hinge were supposed to make dating easier but the plethora of fish in the digital sea hasn’t resulted in Liv’s happily ever after. But the dire state of heterosexuality doesn’t stop a girl from dreaming, living vicariously through love ballads, or anthropomorphising her puppet pals as deadbeat exes, now, does it?
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The climate disaster. The great looming end made up of a myriad of smaller endings; extinctions, floods, and fearsome bushfires. What else is at stake? Could we lose something as monumental as a season? Are we already on our way to a world without winter?
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There’s an old, insidious myth that there were no Aboriginal people in lutriwita (Tasmania) after British colonisation. It’s something Palawa have been fighting for decades to disprove and now they have the added difficulty of a rising popularity in reclaiming disowned Aboriginality, people uncovering buried ancestry or following family rumours and wanting recognition of their Palawa inheritance.
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The queen of crime fiction Agatha Christie isn’t above the occasional trope or red herring. Besides, if all the clues were available to the audience, Poirot and Miss Marple wouldn’t seem as genius as they do. Murdered to Death takes all the quirks and foibles of a Christie classic and amps them up for a deadly satire.
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It’s not uncommon for conversation with a loved one to continue after their death, especially if the passing was sudden. But Grace and Bardy have more than loose ends to tie up. It would seem that Bardy’s death laid the stage for the revelation of more than a few secrets from beyond the grave.
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In 2010, Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović completed one of her most famous performances, The Artist Is Present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where she sat still and silent opposite an empty chair in which audience members were invited to sit and stare at her. The work ran from March to May and garnered responses from art critics, celebrities, and ordinary people from all over the world. The Stella Prize winning novel by Heather Rose, now adapted for the stage, imagines the lives of some of the audience members to Abramović’s performance and the impact it had on them.
Continue reading →Before many people were forced to turn their homes into their workplaces during 2020, office politics were likely a dull daily normality. But, with some distance, how ordinary were they? Well, Actually Productions used the space of the global pandemic to closely examine how inequality and sexism manifest in office microaggressions and not-so-funny colleague banter.
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Night Writes 