AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮ 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

✮✮ 1/2 Shapespeare's Twelfth Night or What You Will Belvoir St Theatre | Sydney directed by Eamon Flack Characters in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or What You Will are drunk with infatuation. They chase after that sweet sensation of being overcome by the notion of love, obsessed with finding reciprocation from the object of their desire. It is an escape from the harsher realities of life, this frivolous respite. Taking us away from stories of war, of incarcerated children, or

✮✮✮ 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

✮✮✮ David Greig's The Events Belvoir St Theatre | Sydney directed by Clare Watson There are probably no issues more pressing than those pertaining to immigration, terrorism and mass shootings. Trying to make sense of these realities has become an everyday fixation in many of our lives, and David Greig’s The Events is a timely and sensitive expression of those concerns. Claire is a priest and choir leader whose life and faith is shattered by a traumatic incident that transform

✮✮✮✮ 1/2 Stephen Sewell's The Blind Giant is Dancing Belvoir St Theatre | Sydney directed by Eamon Flack Stephen Sewell’s The Blind Giant is Dancing premièred in 1983, long before the internet and social media had become a central part of how we understand and engage in politics. Armchair activism had yet to be discovered, and participation in our country’s big issues required more than clicks on neglected polls and petitions or furious rants of 140 characters. If any action

✮✮✮ 1/2 Kate Mulvany's Jasper Jones based on the novel by Craig Silvey Belvoir St Theatre | Sydney directed by Anne-Louise Sarks Laura is found dead, and although not wrapped in plastic, the stories in her town of Corrigan bear many similarities to those at David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. Burgeoning adolescence, secret lovers, hidden sanctuaries, sexual abuse and a creepy man that holds the key to mysteries. Jasper Jones acknowledges the debt it owes to Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mocki

✮✮✮ Angela Betzien's Mortido Belvoir St Theatre | Sydney directed by Leticia Cáceres At the centre of Angela Betzien’s Mortido, is a wretched life. Jimmy is a soft and kind soul, misguided by family and exploited by every person he trusts. Emerging into adulthood from a background of poverty and addiction, the only barometer he possesses for a better life is a need for acceptance, along with our definitive measure of success, money. Without the support of anyone who has Jimmy

✮✮✮✮ 1/2 Anton Chekhov's Ivanov Belvoir St Theatre | Sydney directed by Eamon Flack The word is not explicitly mentioned in Eamon Flack’s adaptation, but his Ivanov shows all the signs of a modern man deeply depressed. He is unable to work, and everything seems to be a source of anxiety. As an educated man of some social standing, Nikolai Ivanov is expected to do better and everyone waits for him to get his act together. Nikolai himself blames no one else for his predicament,

✮✮✮ Sisters Grimm's La Traviata Belvoir St Theatre | Sydney directed by Declan Greene Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La traviata is about love and money. In Ash Flanders and Declan Greene’s radical re-imagination, a third theme of art is added to create a work of theatre that moves emphasis away from sentimental indulgence to something that is altogether more contemporary and intellectual. The exploration of ideas becomes an explicit one. Through five separate sequences, we are encou

✮✮✮ Matthew Whittet's Seventeen Belvoir St Theatre | Sydney directed by Anne-Louise Sarks It is the last day of school, and five seventeen year-olds are celebrating the milestone with great happiness and too much booze. Performed by actors in their seventies, the play promises to offer refreshing perspectives of a rite of passage that most of us are familiar with. Matthew Whittet’s script for Seventeen explores teenage life at its later stages, when adolescents begin to think