Reviews of theatre and performance across Melbourne.
Reviews
Wright’s Lord of the Flies is a thrillingly accomplished production, going beyond modernising a familiar text: it unsettles the assumptions through which we understand it. What if the island experiment shows us a reproduction of the hierarchies and violence of the world they supposedly left behind?
Reviews
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.
Reviews
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.
Reviews
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.
Reviews
Funny, strange and technically thrilling, Behind the Veil builds a richly theatrical world around the extraordinary skills of NICA’s emerging circus artists.
Reviews
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.
Reviews
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.
Reviews
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
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.
Reviews
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.
Reviews
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.
Reviews
An epic story of war, displacement and moral choice becomes achingly intimate in S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack’s exceptionally powerful production.