Somehow, despite loving theatre like the puppy I never got, I have never seen an UMMTA show. I have missed showing after showing, year after year of their music theatre extravaganzas, but I am glad to say I finally made it. And of all the shows to see, a double bill of new works written by up and coming artists is quite the first time. … Continue reading The Factory: Seeing Double
Eclectic. Explosive. Energetic. Exciting. Tastings 18 promised a radical evening of original new works, and the five shows that made up Group B were more than up to delivering. The night’s works explored what it means to be creative, to exist in the 21stcentury, to have a body. It’s hard to come away from a show like this feeling anything other than inspired and creatively … Continue reading Tastings 18: Program B
The seven-course dinner that was Tastings ’18 Group A brought together seemingly heavy subject matters, usually hidden by the mundanity of the everyday, and emphasised their immense weight. Five stand-alone performances stripped away their existential layers and provided us with a fleeting but intimate glimpse of bare emotion and experience. All seven performances in Tastings reflected different ends of the social and cultural spectrum – … Continue reading A Tasting[s ‘18] of Raw Emotion
At a time when natural disasters headline the news every other day, Lab Kelpie’s Oil Babies taps into modern anxieties about a seemingly inevitable apocalypse, and the apparent futility of individual attempts to ‘save the planet’. Written and directed by Petra Kalive, the play depicts a dystopia not at all far away from our own world. Apocalypse is imminent, with the human race on the precipice … Continue reading Oil Babies: Anxiety and Apocalypse
Premiering at Union Theatre House, Things We Should Talk About is an experimental play that asks us to consider heavy and difficult subjects like gender, climate change, race, equality and censorship, and the means through which these subjects are discussed and debated, if they are allowed to be discussed at all. It is not structured as a conventional play, with scenes within an act that tell … Continue reading Things We Should Talk About: A Conventional Review of an Unconventional Play
MUSC’s Plastic Shakespeare presents two short plays based on the idea that Shakespeare can be on the one hand useful and malleable and on the other garish and opaque. The two very different works, Hamlet by the Pool and Engraft, equally enliven and update the bard while complicating our understanding of his modern-day relevance. Written and directed by Isobel Milne, Hamlet By The Pool is a punchy, pacey and … Continue reading Plastic Shakespeare: There’s Something Fresher in The State of Shakespeare
Things We Should Talk About is a newly devised work directed by Xanthe Beesley. The show is a social commentary on why it is so difficult to talk about things that really matter. I sat down with assistant director Harriet Wallace-Mead and ensemble member Mavin R Karunanidhy to have a chat about the show and why they feel it’s an important work to see. To begin … Continue reading Talking about Things We Should Talk About with Harriet Wallace-Mead and Mavin R Karunanidhy
Almost two years ago I auditioned for a Four Letter Word Theatre play and was knocked back. Since then, I have spent every day training my critical eye and plotting my elaborate revenge in the form of a lukewarm review. Two weeks ago, when fate gifted me the opportunity to review FLW’s Everything Is Fine, the animus within me awoke, poised and ready. It is … Continue reading Everything is Not Fine, But That’s Okay
“To walk on mirror water is to walk on sky.” Stepping into Union Theatre, I see a lake. Onstage. Filled with water and reflecting the stars from a screen that falls to the floor behind it. This is a recreation of Lake Tyrell, the subject of Mirror’s Edge, and it is breathtaking. Throughout the play the screen changes from stars, to clouds, to trees – … Continue reading ‘Reflecting’ on Mirror’s Edge
Jean Tong, producer and co-writer of Romeo is Not the Only Fruit, stated during the Q&A after the final show, “there’s never a non-political moment when you’re not a white person”. As such, let it be a truth universally acknowledged that Romeo’s writer is a queer person of colour, and will thus be in want of a politically-charged theatre show. Romeo is Not the Only … Continue reading Romeo is Not the Only Fruit: The Bitter Juice of Queer Deaths In Media
The Dialog 