As Lane Cove Theatre Company’s inaugural short play competition, In a Nutshell presented ten plays of ten minutes as an opportunity for local theatre makers to showcase their work to the Lane Cove community. Ten playwrights, eight directors, and more than a dozen actors offered brief pieces on love, death, veganism, technology, sport, and more!
Image by Ethan Fong
With over 140 dancers and more than 30 choreographed dances, the 2019 major production for Sydney University’s Movement and Dance Society (MADSOC) came out big and bold. Illume hopes to communicate the many unique facets of the human experience through the body’s language of dance.
Lucy and Sphenn are the best of friends. They go on endless adventures together from long rides in the sunshine to breeding puppies to sailing away to Mexico to sell ice cream. Most of all Sphenn and Lucy want to be famous for absolutely anything at all. It’s Lucy’s hair-brained plans for fame, though, that land the pair in a fair amount of trouble.
Image by Abe Bastoli
Two young people feel inspired to understand the world through new eyes and decide to try out homelessness for a week. When they befriend a pair of genuinely destitute young people, the cruelty of their actions becomes apparent. This new Australian play about youth on the streets interrogates the misinformation and ill-feeling around homelessness from opposing perspectives.
Inspired by true events, The Sapphires tells the origin story of an Aboriginal girl group on tour to entertain the troops in Vietnam. The four sisters bring their everything to the band and, over the long, hard few weeks away, they learn a lot more about themselves and the shifting dynamics of their childhood relationships.
Image by Chris Lundie
For the last three generations or so children have been reading The Diary of a Young Girl as a firsthand account of life in Europe under Hitler’s rule for a young Jewish girl. In the stage adaptation by Francis Goodrich and Albert Hackett, the audience is brought directly into the Frank’s annex for the two years that they were in hiding to see the long hours of boredom, brief respite in holiday celebration, and a brooding fear of discovery underpinning it all.
Image by Clare Hawley
A young couple are taking some time together to heal after a rough patch in their relationship. They book a stay at a cozy bed and breakfast in historic Gettysburg and that might be all it is. It also might be an entrance to another dimension, or a house haunted by Civil War soldiers, or an elaborate game of make-believe constructed by owner Kitty. Who’s to really say who’s in charge and what it all means?
Like Salem Barrett-Brown says, trans is very trendy at the moment, occupying a disproportionate amount of news and media attention in Australia. But what’s it like to be one of these illusive transpeople, battling the same late capitalist hell-scape as the normies but with the nation’s concentrated hatred to boot? Open Dyke Night invites a few marginalised identities to weigh in.
Image by Daniel Boud
Performance collective Branch Nebula are looking to interrogate the boundaries of “theatre” including opening the form up to interdisciplinary fields of dance and sport and unusual urban modes. High Performance Packing Tape uses everyday materials to construct a homemade aesthetic and redefine theatrical expectations.
Lotte thinks she deserves a holiday and some loving at the same time but she couldn’t have known her singles tour of Troy would drag her through history into the ancient falling city. Mixing history, mythology, and the modern day, Trojan Barbie is a confronting exploration of the trauma of war through the female victims.
Night Writes 