Reviews - Melbourne Stage Review

Olga Makeeva stands beside a seated Will Lonsdale on a sparse stage, while large blue-tinted projections of his face fill the tall scenic panels behind them.

Reviews

The trouble with the telling: LUKE

Angus Cameron’s LUKE is a sharp, slippery new work about memory, intimacy and the cultural narratives that gather at the blurred edges of harm. Under Iain Sinclair’s direction, Red Stitch gives the play an exhilaratingly assured premiere — bold, restless and deeply provocative.

Deanne Butterworth kneels at centre among six dancers, their bodies gathered in different poses under cool blue stage lighting in 7 Dances for 7 People.

Reviews

A tender ecology: 7 Dances for 7 People

Tender, sensuous, and exquisitely attuned to the elemental, 7 Dances for 7 People dissolves the boundary between bodies and their environment. Seven dancers gather and disperse through haze, sound and light, loosening something in my own body as they go.

Rashid Taki as Marwan, wearing a keffiyeh, sits beside Mohammed El Kesm as The Man, whose head is bandaged, as they read a newspaper together in The Return.

Reviews

The invisible labour in imagining peace: The Return

Tender, searching and remarkably generous, The Return reaches for the humanity that generations of fear and violence so often obscures. Ala’a Al Qaisi’s courageous appeal to find our way beyond them and towards one another is, in a word, extraordinary.

Holly Muir balances upside down on handstand canes, one leg extended beneath a blue umbrella.

Reviews

A world in the balance: Behind the Veil

Funny, strange and technically thrilling, Behind the Veil builds a richly theatrical world around the extraordinary skills of NICA’s emerging circus artists.

Fabio Motta in Holy Fool, leaning forward with an exuberant expression and pointing across the darkened stage.

Reviews

The abundance of almost nothing: Holy Fool

Exceptional physical comedy opens into a spiritual reckoning in Holy Fool — a wildly funny, profoundly moving and utterly sublime piece of theatre, exquisitely directed by Giovanni Fusetti and performed by Fabio Motta with breathtaking skill, generosity and soul.

Two silhouetted figures reach towards one another behind a translucent screen washed in deep blue light during The Memory Mirror.

Reviews

Learning to see: The Memory Mirror

A beautifully nuanced and superbly realised new Australian play, The Memory Mirror reveals its layers with exquisite control. Georgina Luck’s writing, Drew Tingwell’s direction and a stellar ensemble create theatre that is at once playful, mysterious and profoundly affecting.

Jamila Main as Cam stands in the burrow, holding a knife aloft.

Reviews

Stop: How to Eat Rabbit

In How to Eat Rabbit, two friends burrow away at the end of the world, rationing power, sorting tins, craving chocolate and trying to keep each other alive. Between tenderness, betrayal and a two-headed rabbit, survival is one problem. What makes survival worthwhile is another.

Reviews

Hidden a little longer: Beneath the Surface

Moving from lockdown balconies to sibling rivalry, boardroom manoeuvring and an impossible bargain, Edge of the Heart Productions’ four-play collection finds humour, tension and simmering unease in the textures of ordinary lives.

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.