AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮✮ Lucy Kirkwood's The Children Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Sarah Goodes Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children imagines what it would be like, if an all-consuming ecological disaster were to strike today. Instead of the pandemonium surrounding earthquakes and tsunamis, we see an aftermath involving three scientists who are partly responsible for the catastrophe. It is a story about technology, concerned with the way inhabitants of the developed world are failing to f

✮✮✮ Michele Lee's Going Down Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Leticia Cáceres After the publication of her first book, young author Natalie finds herself at a crisis of authenticity. What she had thought to be a good representation of her life and times, has turned out a commercial disappointment. In the search for success, she embarks on a process of self-redefinition. Michele Lee’s Going Down is a tricky story to tell. The play begins at a point where we have to

✮✮✮✮ 1/2 Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Kip Williams A gangster film is projected on screen, as we witness it being shot on a sound stage. The action happens across not two but three platforms. We watch a film, the making of the film, and a theatre production, all simultaneously and frantically taking place before our eyes. Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise Of Arturo Ui is concerned with artifice and image, wri

✮✮✮✮ Caryl Churchill's Top Girls Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Imara Savage Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls exposes our discomfort with stories that talk of societal problems, without the service of convenient villains. We have a hard time thinking about structures that have proven themselves unacceptable, without being able to place blame on individuals or archetypes. Churchill encourages us instead to examine the ways in which those systems insist on our acquiesce

✮✮✮✮ 1/2 Muriel's Wedding book by PJ Hogan music & lyrics Keir Nuttall & Kate Miller-Heidke Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Simon Phillips Like legions of girls through the ages, Muriel was brought up to believe that life is incomplete without a man. It is a fallacy so deeply ingrained into our consciousness, that many are never able to outgrow the absurd notion, that marriage is required as a fundamental validation of our very being. In PJ Hogan’s Muriel’s Weddin

✮✮ Moira Buffini's Dinner Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Imara Savage Paige is throwing a pretentious dinner party, for people she dislikes. Moira Buffini’s takedown of the English upper class, Dinner, begins promisingly enough. Pathetic women and impotent men tearing into each other, to expose the ignorant indulgences of those at the top who seem to have things much easier for no good reason. Touches of surrealism give the play an enjoyable whimsy, but we quickl

✮✮✮ Florian Zeller's The Father Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Damien Ryan André is getting on in years. He remains in good physical condition, but his mind is failing. The protagonist’s disintegrating memory in Florian Zeller’s internationally acclaimed play The Father brings us through a narrative that vacillates in its reliability. We are constantly disoriented, like its subject, confused by the incoherence of people, places and time. Without any dependable me

✮✮✮ 1/2 Disapol Savetsila's Australian Graffiti Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Paige Rattray Asian restaurants are a familiar sight in Australian towns everywhere, but what we know is restricted only to their dining rooms and service areas. In his debut play Australian Graffiti, Disapol Savetsila, the youngest ever playwright (23) on the company's main stage, presents a fantastical, yet bleak, look at what happens behind the kitchen door of these inscrutable spac

✮✮✮✮ 1/2 Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Kip Williams Betty takes a long time to grow up. In fact, it is centuries before she becomes her own woman. In Act I, she lives in Victorian era Africa, having moved from Britain with her husband, a “colonial administrator”. In Act II, we find that not only has she advanced in age, time itself has moved abruptly to the current day. ​ Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine is about the way gender, with all

✮✮✮✮ 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