AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮ End of Moving Walkway's Laughing Matter King's Head Theatre | London directed by Paul Lichtenstern One of the hardest things for any actor to do is surely to act like they're not acting, to pretend that they are a 'real person' rather than a performer or artist creating make-believe in the very show people have paid to see. If successful, the question then becomes how long they can convince a sceptical and perhaps fidgety audience before giving the game away. The self-p

✮✮✮ 1/2 Lally Katz's Back at the Dojo Belvoir St Theatre | Sydney directed by Chris Kohn Lois lays in a hospital bed, with her husband Dan by her side waiting for her to gain consciousness. Their granddaughter Patti appears unannounced and drugged out, after disappearing for two years working on her gender transition. Dan and Patti take time to mend their bond, and in the process we witness parallels between Dan’s life in the late sixties, becoming his own man through the dis

✮✮✮ 1/2 D.C. Moore's Straight Kings Cross Theatre | Sydney directed by Shane Bosher Lewis and Waldorf are old friends from university days, reunited several years after their lives have taken different turns. While intoxicated, they decide to make an amateur porn film with each other. Lewis is married, with a history of just 2 sexual partners, and the happily single Waldorf is more experienced with 71, but neither have had encounters with men. Based on the 2009 film Humpday b

✮✮✮ Mike Bartlett's Wild Hampstead Theatre | London directed by James Macdonald Andrew, the central character in Mike Bartlett’s new play, may as well have just been called Edward Snowden. He is a whistle-blower from the United States who leaked information about government surveillance and has found himself a fugitive, trapped in Russia, with nowhere to turn. Even the actor playing Andrew, Jack Farthing, looks remarkably like Snowden. Over the course of the play, he is visit

✮✮✮✮✮ OUR land people stories Bangarra Dance Theatre Sydney Opera House | Sydney Three separate works are featured in Bangarra Dance Theatre’s OUR land people stories, each with a distinct flavour but unified by discipline, culture and history. Independently striking in style, they tell different stories of the Indigenous experience through the medium of dance at its most progressive and adventurous. Sumptuously designed by the formidable trio of Matt Cox (lights), Jennifer I

✮✮✮✮ Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea National Theatre | London directed by Carrie Cracknell Hester Collyer, the central character in Terence Rattigan’s 1952 classic, has more than just a hint of Mrs. Dalloway about her. Hester is slowly revealed to us through the events that unfold over one single day, as Clarissa Dalloway is in Virginia Woolf’s novel. Both women keep themselves tightly composed; both concerned with how they appear to others and weighed down with expecta

✮✮✮✮ Phaedra(s) after Sarah Kane, Wajdi Mouawad and J. M. Coetzee Barbican Theatre | London directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski In the run-up to the EU referendum, the presence of such a quintessentially French cultural institution as the Odéon-Théatre de l'Europe brought a special resonance to the Barbican, offering a timely reminder of the languages, cultures and collective history that the UK is currently considering divorcing. Indeed, three and a half hours later, the even

✮✮✮✮ Arthur Miller's All My Sons Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Kip Williams Joe Keller’s wealth is a result of monumental sacrifice. Arthur Miller’s All My Sons is about the cost of money and the naivety that can come with human greed. Joe makes the decision to choose financial success over a clear conscience, thinking that his riches will be able to shield him from the damage that he causes. There is a willing ignorance at play in Joe’s story that many of us un

✮✮✮ Nina Raine's Tribes Ensemble Theatre | Sydney directed by Susanna Dowling Billy is the only deaf person in the family. His parents have gone to great lengths to make him feel part of the roost, no different from his siblings. They have brought him up to communicate by lip reading and speaking, both of which he does inordinately well, without ever having to learn sign language. Billy’s father, Christopher is determined to prevent his son from facing undue limitations in li

✮✮✮ 1/2 Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream Southwark Playhouse | London directed by Simon Evans A little too self-congratulatory at first, director Simon Evans’ two-hour panto-esque entertainment about a comically inept production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream gets better the longer it goes on, and by the end few in the audience will have laughed as loudly at any Shakespeare comedy they've seen before. A few lucky individuals (or poor souls) will also have never been pluc