Sydney’s Short + Sweet Theatre Festival brings together groups of writers, directors, and performers to put on dozens of ten minute plays over eight weeks. Each of those weeks sees a selection of Wildcard plays and Top 80 plays compete for audience, judges, and crew votes to put their work through to the semi-finals and, eventually, the top of the Short + Sweet podium.
Image by Clare Hawley
Four people enter a supermarket like any ordinary Tuesday. To their shopping trips they bring the baggage of their families, problems, and personalities. Soon they will share the connection of witnessing a violent attack but, for now, they wander the aisles and think to themselves.
Image by Dawn Pugh
Based on the real events of a student invading the home of Germaine Greer, The Female of the Species sets past, present, and future feminists against each other to find the reckoning point between theory and practise.
Metamorphosis was a seminal text from Franz Kafka, one of the most important writers of the 20th century. It depicts young Gregor, a son working to support his poor family, who wakes up one morning to discover he has become a cockroach. This production of the stage adaptation by David Farr and Gisli Orn Gardarsson shifts the dire and dreary tone of Kafka’s novella to something more dramatic.
Image by Clare Hawley
Dorian Gray has broken free of the confines of Oscar Wilde’s story and he fully intends to settle any discrepancies, right wrongs, and gain control over his legacy. In a clever new meta musical from librettist Melvyn Morrow and composer Dion Condack, the unspoken sexuality of the Picture of Dorian Gray is laid bare while the eternal youth’s hopes and desires are given life out from under his creator’s thumb.
Image by Luke Tierney
Sydney-based guitar duo Andrew Blanch and Arial Nurhadi bring their newest program Alchemy to the stage for 2019. The included pieces span the globe, coming from composers from France, Spain, Brazil, USA, Argentina, and Australia. The duo demonstrate a wide range of playing styles and tones for the classical guitar in this program, named after one of the first pieces the pair learned together from the Australian composer Phillip Houghton.
Image by Jamie Williams
On the cusp of World War I, a young soldier is invited to Baron Kekesfalva’s castle for a party. After embarrassing himself by asking the Baron’s paralysed daughter to dance, Anton Hofmiller attempts to apologise and sets in motion his entanglement with this sad and unusual family. This joint production between Schaubühne Berlin and Complicité based on the Austrian novel by Stefan Zweig is a dark and arresting examination of the rotting influence of pity on a life and its relationships.
Image by Prudence Upton
Lara is interstate working as a dancer to support her two young boys back in Sydney when she receives a call that their father, who was supposed to watching them, hasn’t been home for two days. She has the weekend to fly home, take care of her boys, find her partner, and settle the situation before returning to Cairns by Monday. This one-woman production is about the battleground of family and addiction set in Sydney’s public housing.
Image by Brett Boardman
In the centre of Town Hall’s iconic Victorian design, Belvoir and Co-Curious have erected an immense courtyard which will become a house, a prison, a playground, and a beach over nearly 50 years of four generations and two countries. Counting and Cracking is about family, culture, and a sense of self and the way these are torn apart or trodden down by politics, war, and fear.
Image by Victor Frankowski
This review comes from Night Writes guest reviewer Gabriella Florek.
Having seen just a short minute or so long trailer of Home, and leaving the inspection of the program notes until after the show, I had a few wild ideas of what I might experience from the opening night. But, nothing about Geoff Sobelle’s magic production was what I expected it to be.
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