AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮ Laura Johnston's Hitchcock's Birds Sydney Fringe Festival | Sydney directed by Laura Johnston Even though Alfred Hitchcock’s films were usually about male protagonists, it is his leading ladies that remain unforgettable. In Hitchcock’s Birds, Laura Johnston presents a compilation of anecdotes, ranging from the cautiously dubious to the downright objectionable, by a series of legendary blonde bombshells who had worked with the master of suspense. Misogyny in Hitchcock’s fi

✮✮✮✮ Sara Ruhl's Late: A Cowboy Song Sydney Fringe Festival | Sydney directed by Sarah Dunn The simpler the story, the deeper we can delve into the nature of being human. We have a tendency, in life and in art, for complication. Believing in the more the merrier, we cloud up our transient existences with illusory fixations that distract from the truth. Sarah Ruhl’s Late: A Cowboy Song takes the shortest distance between two points, and in the process, deconstructs some of the

✮✮✮✮ Suzan-Lori Parks' Father Comes Home From the Wars The Royal Court Theatre | London directed by Jo Bonney In the week the National Museum of African American History & Culture finally opened its doors in Washington, DC, Suzan-Lori Parks' monumental trilogy about black freedom in the American Civil War is playing to British audiences for the first time. Epic in every sense including length, the three-plays-in-one combine grandiose, almost Homeric poetry with domestic comed

✮✮✮✮ 1/2 Eliza Sanders' Pedal & Castles Sydney Fringe Festival | Sydney directed by Charles Sanders Pedal & Castles are a pairing of individual pieces that demonstrate the genius talent of Eliza Sanders, whose boundless exploration into performance and theatre creation delivers experiences that are full of joy, surprise and wonder. Amalgamating the clichéd triple threat of singing, dancing and acting, Sanders redefines the stage artist into a singular agent with capacities li

✮✮✮ 1/2 Nathaniel Martello-White's Torn The Royal Court Theatre | London directed by Richard Twyman The Royal Court Upstairs is completely stripped down for Nathaniel Martello-White’s new play. Instead of a traditional theatre space, it now resembles a community centre hall. The walls are white and empty; tea and coffee facilities stand to one side. The audience wander in and sit down on the plastic-backed chairs, while Angel (Adelle Leonce) paces alone, fusses with the layou

✮✮✮ 1/2 Leah Purcell's The Drover's Wife Belvoir St Theatre | Sydney directed by Letitia Cáceres In Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife, race relations in Australia are placed front and centre, and we have nowhere to hide from its confrontations. 1893 is in some ways a long time ago, but in Aboriginal terms, especially, we can still think of the story as a contemporary one. The invasion is ongoing, and the carnage, although better disguised, still persists. The cruelty and bruta

✮✮✮ Olivia O'Flynn's Crocodile Tears Sydney Fringe Festival | Sydney directed by Alexander Butt Tilly Devine was a legendary personality of the Sydney underworld. Violent and ruthless, the Darlinghurst madam is brought back to life in Olivia O’Flynn’s short play Crocodile Tears, which cashes in on the glamorous mystique of clandestine criminality. It is an archetypal bad girl story that appeals to our curiosity and thirst for sordid details on things we never dare experience

✮✮✮✮ 1/2 James Fritz's 4 Minutes 12 Seconds Old Fitz Theatre | Sydney directed by Craig Baldwin There is a monster in the house, and we need to know where he has come from. Jack is seventeen and, to his parents, suddenly no longer a boy, but a strange being whose abhorrent behaviour towards his ex-girlfriend shocks the family to its very foundations. James Fritz’s 4 Minutes 12 Seconds is about the parenting of boys, the evolving nature of sex, and most of all, it is about mis

✮✮✮ Clare Hennessy's Transience Sydney Fringe Festival | Sydney directed by Clemence Williams Gender has always been a means of policing behaviour. We look at one’s genitals at birth and assign a whole universe of expectations that have nothing to do with the individual’s own nature and desires. The world is split in two halves, male and female, and any deviation that threatens to transgress that dichotomy is traditionally prohibited. In Clare Hennessy’s pseudo sci-fi Transie

✮✮✮✮ Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Kip Williams Characters get up to a lot of mischief in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but what can be construed as humorous, can also be seen as menacing. The play features deception, sabotage, humiliation and misogyny, subversively, and surreptitiously, framed within a category of conventional comedy, leaving the depths of its darkness unacknowledged. One of Western theatre’s most well-known