Ellen M. Scott - Melbourne Stage Review

Four performers dance along the upper deck of a cruise ship under purple and blue nightclub lighting.

Reviews

The making of the pack: Savages

Uncanny, playful and increasingly menacing, Kitan Petkovski’s masterful production of Patricia Cornelius’s Savages watches camaraderie slowly curdle into the ugliest form of male entitlement.

Tobias Manderson-Galvin and Aquilla Sorensen perform on a sparsely furnished stage washed in red light in Cold War 2.0.

Reviews

Smile, we are watching you: Cold War 2.0

Punk, politics, surveillance and pop culture collide in Cold War 2.0, a theatrical barrage where meaning is both made and lost in the noise.

Gowrie stands alone on the wide, dimly lit stage, surrounded by darkness and the curved industrial set.

Reviews

No safe distance: The Jungle and the Sea

An epic story of war, displacement and moral choice becomes achingly intimate in S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack’s exceptionally powerful production.

One dancer leaps above another crouched on the timber floor as blue-white laser beams slice across Melbourne Town Hall in Chunky Move’s Time Remaining.

Reviews

The choreography of attention: Chunky Move’s Time Remaining

Hamilton’s Time Remaining is an exhilaratingly intelligent work: visually assured, formally adventurous, and alive to the peculiar contemporary anxiety of being engulfed by the technological systems of our own making.

Concentric ripples spreading across the surface of dark water.

Essays

Circles in the water: A credo for theatre criticism

What do I owe myself when I go to the theatre? An essay about attention, expertise, repetition, astonishment, and the kind of critic I hope to become and to remain.

Jamie and Zahra sit together at a dining table under purple stage lighting in Cut Chilli.

Reviews

Some home truths are hard to swallow: Cut Chilli

Wickedly witty, deeply complicated and remarkably tender, Cut Chilli finds comedy, anguish and profound intimacy in the messy politics of family, intercountry adoption and what it means to belong.

Rae sleeps on the kitchen bench while Pop sleeps nearby in his chair inside Pamela’s dimly lit home, surrounded by the darkness of the stage.

Reviews

Break of Day: Dignity without innocence

A deeply moving new Australian play about class, care, social mobility and the lives we make within forces we did not choose.

Five performers in party hats and exaggerated costumes crowd around a noseless figure crouched on the floor with hands over ears, amid a ramshackle set plastered with ‘FRAUD’ posters.

Reviews

The clown gag inside the horror: Marginalia

Funny, disturbing and increasingly unhinged, Pummel Squad’s Marginalia uses grotesque clowning and poor theatre to expose a world warped by power, precarity and need.

La Castiglione peers through a frame held over one eye beside a torn sheet of notepaper reading “Exhibition: First and Second”, with “draft” and “final” crossed out and “work in progress"

Notes

Notes from an unfinished exhibition

In Exhibition: First and Second, Caroline Lee offers a startlingly intimate glimpse of a performance still becoming — its uncertainty and workings laid bare.

Lucy Ansell sits alone on a raised concrete walkway surrounded by flowers and plants in Red Stitch's production of Funeral Flowers.

Essays

Funeral Flowers: Still growing

Emotionally devastating, psychologically astute and quietly transformative, Funeral Flowers is a remarkable Australian premiere. Lucy Ansell's extraordinary solo performance brings Emma Dennis-Edwards' compassionate meditation on care, resilience and hope vividly to life.

Five performers on the Losing Face set, with three women seated in treatment chairs between a nurse and wellness guru.

Essays

Losing Face and the trouble with ageing well

Marieke Hardy’s Losing Face turns the contemporary project of “ageing well” into grotesque farce. But as the bodies become stranger and the jokes keep coming, a more uncomfortable question emerges: what exactly are we laughing at?

Jane Montgomery-Griffiths as Layla, standing amid the rubble of a war-damaged interior.

Reviews

Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity: What might we become

In a world of extraordinary brutality and beauty, Heather McDonald’s Masterpieces asks what human beings preserve, what they destroy, and what they might yet become.