In David Williams's Smaller, the accidents of family history meet the grinding absurdities of the NDIS. Wry, tender and quietly unnerving, this deftly constructed piece of theatre turns the bureaucratic business of reassessment into a source of palpable dread.
What do we overlook when we measure a person's needs by what they can no longer do? Kamarra Bell-Wykes's deeply affecting Before I Forget offers a moving portrait of memory, family and belonging. From its powerful final scene, this essay examines aged care failures and the assumptions of criticism.
Claire Nicholls and Kevin Hopkins bring mischief, theatrical invention and a terrific ensemble to Shakespeare's strange tale of generosity and greed. With Jovanna Hepburn in volcanic form, this is a lively, deliciously peculiar Timon of Athens, even if some of its early surreal magic slips away.
A machine learns to ask questions. People supply rather more answers than anyone bargained for. In Tom Holloway's Eliza, directed by Paige Rattray, a modest experiment attracts the lonely, the ambitious and the dangerously well-connected. The machine is the least complicated thing in the room.
Jessica Thompson’s EAT ME is a ferocious, unruly piece of dance-theatre. Her Venus is hungry, grotesque and terribly alone, and Thompson’s astonishing physical command makes even the goddess’s most undignified moments riveting. Beauty has rarely looked so miserable, or been so compelling to watch.
Wickedly witty and superbly acted, Grace Chapple's Never Closer is directed by Marni Mount with unnerving sensitivity. Old friendships have rarely looked so treacherous, or their smallest gestures of tenderness so consequential. Exquisite theatre, with a potent understanding of human frailty.
Our Melbourne Fringe Festival Reviews in Brief, first published on Instagram, are gathered here in one collection. Eight shows put formidable skills to dubious uses. Tenderness sneaks in while everyone’s busy making a spectacle of themselves.
The lights are blinding, the sound unnerving, the dancers absorbed in some peculiar business. Their movements are fierce, precise and wonderfully strange. I was transfixed, though I'm still not entirely sure what I witnessed. Extraordinary stuff.
Not a Jam gives the pleasures and dilemmas of contact improvisation an exquisitely judged theatrical shape. Speech, stillness, sound and shifting weight draw us into the intimacy of a shared practice, revealing how feeling at home in a body might become a way of belonging among others.
I found something deeply replenishing in The Village Square: the warmth of its storytelling, the musicians’ sensitivity, and the delight taken in small things. Amid Melbourne Fringe’s many competing energies, its unhurried rhythm held me happily in its care.
There are things Ben Grant never knew about his parents, including the tenderness they struggled to express. Discovered after their deaths, their letters form the basis of this disarmingly funny exploration of family, grief and the peculiar intimacy of reading words never intended for you.
Age is no excuse for behaving yourself. With ridiculous costumes, unruly dancing and a few uncomfortable truths about growing older, Prime Time takes a playful swipe at the generation gap. Beneath the silliness, there's a surprisingly tender provocation: what if we stop counting?
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There are giant eyeballs, a singing mop and enough Kate Bush to satisfy the Fish People. But Sarah-Louise Young’s cleverest trick is making a roomful of strangers feel, for an evening, like they belong to one another.
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God, death, shame, desire and the appalling inconvenience of other people. Hitherto turns the existential crisis into a gloriously funny theatrical playground, where meaning is always just within reach — until someone starts meowing.
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Irene Holub’s Manifesto of Silences is an exhilarating reimagining of opera, where signing bodies, shifting images and vibrations beneath the seats create a work of extraordinary beauty, anguish and tenderness.
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Emma Fawcett’s Toto’s Song is a glorious, irreverent and deeply moving portrait of a woman determined to live and die on her own terms. With magnificent performances and exceptional direction from Kate Fryer, this La Mama production is among the finest theatre of the year.
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Ngioka Bunda-Heath’s Estuary is a beautiful, unsettling exploration of bodies, belonging, water and Country. Through recurring movement, the deep thrum of its soundscape and a landscape contracting around its dancers, the work gathers a disquieting force, while its images linger.
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He likes things just so. She has other ideas. The Portrait finds glorious, somewhat cathartic physical comedy in the oh-so-recognisable rules, rituals and petty irritations of working life.
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For all its fury about governments, institutions and wealthy benefactors, Fuck Your Funding keeps turning its attention back onto the artists themselves. Hamilton allows each person inside the argument enough humanity to become inconvenient. The result is messy, funny, fiercely intelligent theatre.
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Soil passes from hand to hand. Scent settles differently on each wrist. Luke Casserly’s Distillation makes an Irish bog sensuously present, while quietly opening questions about land, memory and place.
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Funny, tender and beautifully performed, Rhomboid explores the messy space between friendship and romantic love, and the limits of the language we use to describe how we feel about one another.
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Funny, furious and unexpectedly moving, Exhibit turns the act of looking into its theatrical playground, poking at the gap between being looked at and being seen — and what happens when other people’s eyes begin to shape your own sense of self.
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Gregory Nussen’s extraordinary QFWFQ tumbles through Calvino, queerness, Jewishness, family and Palestine. Funny, formally audacious and achingly tender, it turns the unfinished story into something profoundly alive.
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Janice Muller’s Waiting for Godot is superbly performed: funny, affecting and completely absorbing. Tim Heath and Gus Read-Hill are glorious as Vladimir and Estragon, while Tim Rogers and Luke Lennox bring comic extravagance, menace and astonishing force to Beckett’s strange world.