After the success of Kill Climate Deniers in 2018, playwright David Finnigan again brings climate change explicitly to the stage with a story full of raunchy, raucous characters and extreme circumstances. This time environmentalism comes up against click-bait sexuality when a young writer finds herself caught in the middle of art v capitalism and control v pleasure.
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An American, an Irishwoman, and an Englishman come together to discuss an exciting new theatre project that will provoke the London scene. Except the distinctions aren’t really that clean-cut and even a gentle nudge throws the balance of identity, religion, and politics into a messy, urgent disaster.
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Ian Darling and Greg Fleet discovered their unique stage partnership in a high school production of the Comedy of Errors in 1978. Some 40 years later they want to reclaim those old feelings and return to the stage together but the intervening years have done some damage. In this meta-play, the two old friends sift through two lifetimes of regrets, disappointments, and unexpected triumphs.
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Australia loves sport. It turns teams into families, players into warriors, and games into wars. And, as much as some people use sport for escapism, the industry has a long history of perpetuating, ignoring, or failing to engage adequately with global concerns of racism, homophobia, and toxic masculinity. The Pass flips the script, using elite sport as the backdrop to riffle around in these issues and their intersections with success, sacrifice, and authenticity.
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This review comes from Night Writes guest reviewer Brianna McCarthy.
Fangirls is a hilarious and beaming musical production that has just opened for a second season at the Seymour Centre after a wildly successful run at Belvoir in 2019. The show brilliantly engages in vindicating the passionate highs and lows of growing up as a girl, falling into all-consuming love with teen idols and discovering what it truly means to be yourself.
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There’s a phenomenon often discussed amongst women where you reach a certain age and suddenly become invisible. Because you’ve passed through the three layers of societally recognised womanhood, (ie virgin, desirable, mother), you’re no longer relevant or worthy of attention. In this new show, creators Jonny Hawkins and Nell Ranney turn all the attention to older women and pay tribute to their stories in a conglomerate homage character named Maureen the Harbinger of Death.
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Image by Jasmin Simmons
The Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey conducted by the Australian Government in 2017 was a controversial decision that sparked a turbulent and retraumatising time for LGBTQIA+ people, particularly those who remembered the recent civil rights debates in Tasmania. From 1988-1997 gay rights activists campaigned to decriminalise homosexuality in Tasmania, the last state to do so; a campaign honoured in Campion Decent’s verbatim play the Campaign.
Image by David Hooley
Theo Maske is a respectable man with a well-paying government job and he will not tolerate a scandal, most especially not a scandal involving his wife dropping her underpants in the middle of a crowd. However, rather than suffering the expected consequences of embarrassment and a sacking, the incident seems to work out in Herr Maske’s profitable favour.
Image by Alison Lee Rubie
What is the measure of a life? It’s a question not often considered in the rush of living but left for the last moments of reflection when it all feels a bit too late. Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize winning script is a meditation on the boundary between life and death from the perspective of one accustomed to the event in the abstract.
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.
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