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

✮✮✮✮ 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

✮✮✮ 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

✮✮✮ 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

✮✮✮ 1/2 Hannah Cox and Caitlin West's Tammy & Kite Sydney Fringe Festival | Sydney devised and performed by Hannah Cox and Caitlin West We are at home with two very funny sisters. Kite is in year three, and although Tammy is seven years older, the siblings are extremely close, spending almost all of their stage time making each other, and their audience, laugh with joyful glee. We watch the playful pair weather thick and thin, and when things get rough, Tammy & Kite shows us

✮✮✮ James Hartley's This Modern Coil Sydney Fringe Festival | Sydney directed by James Hartley Two soldiers are trapped on a minefield, forced to confront death and each other’s beliefs about death. Intelligent, humorous and charming, James Hartley’s This Modern Coil explores our relationship with mortality, through a process that is inevitably philosophical, for an existentialist work that is simultaneously universal and challenging. The writing operates at several levels of

✮✮✮ Paul Gilchrist's Atlantis Sydney Fringe Festival | Sydney directed by Kit Bennett A meaningful existence can only ever be understood from a position of subjective experience. In Paul Gilchrist’s Atlantis, things may contain inherent value. However, it is up to us to bring interpretation to them, and we have a choice in how we read the world and how we immerse ourselves in the inevitable living of it. We all rely on tall tales to get us through each day and night, calling