In a phone interview last week with writer, director and performer Michelle Higgs about her new play ‘And Then There Were 3’, I was filled in on the in-and-outs and up-and-downs of playwriting and parenting. Debuting at the Street Theatre, Canberra from December 4-8, ‘And Then There Were 3’ is a play centred on…
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Ben Brooker’s The Lake was first performed in a rehearsed reading by five.point.one last year. This year it premieres with a full production by five.point.one in The Arch, a small old church at Holden Street Theatres. Before entering we are given a small torch and told to use it to find our chairs and to…
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John Doyle is probably best known to many as Roy of Roy and HG fame. That’s certainly how I knew him, although I won’t pretend to be that familiar with the world of sports comedy. Nonetheless, I was looking forward to seeing a play written by someone known to be so astutely funny. Vere (Faith)…
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The events that transpired over the last days of poet Sylvia Plath’s life is a delicate subject, and has been the subject of much speculation for the last 50 years. Australian playwright Barry Dickins has attempted to tackle this difficult topic in his one-woman show, A Kind of Fabulous Hatred. The performance is set on…
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Kicking off its run at the Melbourne Fringe Festival later this month, Lady Sings it Better is blackcat productions’ pièce de résistance. The performance sees a troupe of 4 women ‘take on the western world’s most famous male musicians and reinvent them as hilarious, high energy cabaret‘. Ginuwine’s Pony, AC/DC’s You Shook Me All Night…
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Kneehigh’s Brief Encounter is Noël Coward on Noël Coward on Noël Coward. The production combines the texts of his 1945 film Brief Encounter with the 1936 play Still Life on which it was based, interspersed throughout with songs by Coward. First performed by the Cornish company in 2008, Brief Encounter has played in the…
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Directed by Chris Drummond, Babyteeth, explores the effects of cancer on the families it touches. The production, currently showing at the State Theatre Company of South Australia, Adelaide, also depicts an unusual love story, undoubtedly spurred on by the disease. Fourteen year old Milla (Danielle Catanzariti) meets twenty-five year old Moses (Matt Crook) at a train…
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We have all heard the saying ‘a picture is worth 1000 words’. For Canberra-based theatre veteran Chrissie Shaw, this rang true a few years ago during a visit to a Melbourne art gallery. There Shaw was struck by a black-and-white photograph, Madame Bijou in the Bar de la Lune, Paris (1932). This image set her…
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I had trepidation about seeing a theatre show that was so ostentatious as to be named Art. That’s one big call right there. But it turns out French playwright Yasmina Reza’s work, which showed at Melbourne’s Gasworks Theatre from 1 to 3 August, lives up to the title, pulling big philosophical punches one after the…
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When Georges Seurat completed A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte in 1884 he could only have dreamed of the iconic status the painting would achieve. He would, no doubt, have wanted to demonstrate his artistic credentials and silence his many critics. Inspiring a Pulitzer Prize winning musical one hundred years later was…
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Maureen O’Hara Spends a Quiet Night At Home began as a concept wonderful in its simplicity. Dramatising the photo series by Peter Stackpole of the same name, which in 1946 captured film star Maureen O’Hara during a “normal evening in”, the fifty minute performance piece gives the audience an intimate glimpse into the imagined private…
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Last week, Australia said goodbye to one of its theatrical matriarchs. Betty Burstall, the enigmatic founder of Melbourne’s La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, died peacefully aged 87. Her legacy includes the theatre she founded in the 1970s and the countless playwrights, actors, directors and other creatives she nurtured over her long career. When Burstall founded…
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‘Kids and adults alike will be taken on a journey’ promises Cathy Petocz, the star of Pea. This inventive interpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s classic fairy tale The Princess and the Pea is premiering at the Street Theatre, Canberra this month. I had a chat to Petocz to find out all about the show, from…
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Pippa Evans is a comedian who isn’t afraid to tackle controversial topics. Fascinated by her performance, Bipolar, at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, I sat down with Evans to discuss comedy, feminism and her outspoken character Loretta Maine. While your character, Loretta Maine, is quite bawdy and shocking, a lot of what she says is thought-provoking. Do…
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