AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮✮ George Orwell's 1984 Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Robert Icke & Duncan Macmillan People often look back at calamitous histories, and are grateful that they had emerged unscathed. In Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s version of 1984, dystopia is not only an imagined future, but also a tragic past that its characters are happy to have left behind. When the worst is over, we think that life returns to a state of healthy normalcy. We choose to believe that th

✮✮✮ 1/2 Steven Dietz's Lonely Planet Tabard Theatre | London directed by Ian Brown No, Lonely Planet thankfully isn't some cheesy dramatisation of a popular travel guide series. This enjoyable if heart-wrenching UK première of Steven Dietz's powerful 1993 AIDS lament is a welcome tie-in with London's Pride festival. Although everyone this year is rightly celebrating 50 years since homosexuality was legalised in Britain, Dietz's intimate play is a sobering reminder of the trag

✮✮✮ The Great Tamer Dimitris Papaioannou Holland Festival | Amsterdam An astronaut bounding across a moonscape, a disembodied leg crawling out of a hole, a hundred arrows sweeping the sky and piercing the floor – these are just some of the surreal scenes in Dmitris Papaioannou’s new dance theatre production The Great Tamer. The visual artist, who rose to international prominence after directing the opening of the 2004 Olympics in Athens, has long identified as more of compose

✮✮✮✮ Paula Vogel's Indecent Court Theatre | NYC directed by Rebecca Taichman Paula Vogel opens her show within the playbill in the form of a note to the audience. In this note she describes the purpose of theatre as a way to, “...wound our memory so we can remember.” This memory wounding then reminds us of past traumas and pain, which are then re-examined and perhaps resolved once the wound heals or at least that’s one way to interpret it. Indecent, Vogel’s newest play and lo