Tag / theatre

by nightwritessydney

The Museum of Modern Love | Seymour Centre

Image by Ten Alphas

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.

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by nightwritessydney

We’re All Terrible, Let’s Watch TV | Well, Actually Productions

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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by nightwritessydney

Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran | Javaad Alipoor Company and National Theatre of Parramatta

Image by Peter Dibdin

If global crises like climate change or COVID-19 make anything clear, it’s that the wealthy and the poor are living in completely different version of reality. Some can have whatever they want whenever they want it while others are literally struggling to keep their heads above water. This second instalment of a trilogy in Javaad Alipoor’s “state of the world” theatre-making takes on wealth, power, and Instagram.

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by nightwritessydney

Green Park | Griffin Theatre Company

Image by Wendell Teodoro

Two strangers meet in a park ostensibly for a simple hook-up. But they each want something from the other and they aren’t being entirely honest about it either. As darkness falls and the sounds of evening traffic creeps in, the carefully hidden aspects of their lives begin to infiltrate their rendezvous and unsettle their strange acquaintance.

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by nightwritessydney

Wudjang: Not the Past | Bangarra Dance Theatre & Sydney Theatre Company

Image by Daniel Boud

When the future or even the present feel so pressing it can be difficult to see the relevance of old stories and traditions. But in this collaborative performance between Bangarra Dance Theatre and Sydney Theatre Company, the past is shown to be ongoing with powerful lessons that ancestors can teach about resilience and care.

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by nightwritessydney

Killing Katie: Confessions of a Book Club | Ensemble Theatre

Image by Lisa Tomasetti

Friendships are delicate things and they can grow brittle with age as people set into their ways and rhythms. So when a new voice gets injected into an old script, it can make or break the very foundations of the friendship. In this case, it even ends in death.

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by nightwritessydney

Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? | State Theatre Company South Australia

Image by Yaya Stempler

Edward Albee’s searing critique of 1960s American polite society is a classic but that doesn’t exclude it from examination as time, opinion, and attitudes change. In this production the text gets held up to the light, prodded a bit; does this thing still hold up? Does it still ring true?

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by nightwritessydney

Slow Burn | Q Theatre

Bushfires are a familiar summer phenomenon in Australia but, if you’re among the majority of lucky Australians, you don’t see much beyond the nightly news segments and brief interview soundbites from survivors. What does a bushfire do to a community or a family? How might the shock of loss shape the rest of someone’s life?

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by nightwritessydney

44 Sex Acts in One Week | Club House Productions

Image by Brett Boardman

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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by nightwritessydney

宿 (stay) | Kurinji & SAtheCollective with OzAsia Festival

Image by Jacquie Manning

History is an inescapable force. It settles deep into the soil and reverberates forward through time. In this new multidisciplinary collaborative production that spans Australia and Singapore, the consequences of a generations-old crime crop up in the lives of three seemingly unrelated women. What about their past is hiding in plain sight?

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