Reviews

Medical students Tony and John, together with Tony’s live-in girlfriend Vera, welcome a new student to their house. Simon Sparrow. He’s the nephew of the dominating and influential Sir Lancelot Spratt, and is shoe-horned into the established shared lodgings, playing drinking games and singing raucous songs – but it’s England in the 1950s, so it’s mostly clean fun, with a dose of dated values being medicated by some strong female personalities.

Amish?  Rumours of?  But that reference to the fundamentalist Anabaptist Amish sect in this show’s catchy title is just a way to introduce the way Stephanie Hare grew up in the wilds of Tasmania without technology, without electricity - not even a fridge!  The Amish eschew technology out of religious conviction.  Hare’s Mum was not religious – she was, if anything, a Communist who moved into the wilderness and built a house out of conviction and – as Hare puts it – firewood.  We see a wide shot picture of this house on a big screen, but

Fresh New Worries shines light on the pressures of everyday living in our modern tech world when everything is a Google search away from just another anxiety. Gillian Cosgriff has a ripper of a show running at the Melbourne Comedy Festival and has everybody gasping for more as she juggles her talents around a white  box of  worries plonked  on a Grecian plinth to  the side and her  baby grand piano on the other.

Despite the rather stodgy British title, Midnight Murder at Hamlington Hall is a new Australian play, originally commissioned for Sydney’s Ensemble Theatre. It’s the opening night of a new murder mystery, presented by amateur theatre company Middling Cove Players, and many of the cast have 'tested positive’. As, for reasons familiar to many companies, the show must go on, the three remaining actors and anyone else that they can co-opt, pitch in to do the show.