Reviews

At the beginning, Rosie (Eva Rees), youngest of the Price family children, backpacking in Europe, tells us that after her heart was broken, she tried to make a list of all the things she knew to be true… but she found in the end that it was a very short list.  This is beautiful writing from Andrew Bovell.  The speech – plus Rees’ sweet sincerity - gives us Rosie and her demolished innocence, and makes us care for her, and it states a key theme of this moving 2016 play about ‘ordinary people’. 

As one of Shakespeare’s light-hearted comedies with many fantastical aspects, this text is not normally associated with being edgy and somewhat dark in its nature. This production takes some licence with the casting and sequencing of events and creates a very moody piece without losing any of the impish humour. In fact, this highlights the contrast between the eerie ethereal creatures that inhabit the wooded space and the other spheres represented in the play. The magic of the forest creatures is created more through subversion and daring than stardust.

It’s not often that you walk into a small community theatre staging the world premiere of a locally written play with such an ambitious narrative.

Two Ladies and an Emu has a Priscillia Queen of the Desert come Thelma and Louise vehicle centred plot. In this instance two women are on a road trip in outback Australia traversing long dusty highways and visiting campsites and towns along the way.

Here’s a spirited show about Alice Anderson (played with endearing energy by Madelaine Nunn).  A motor car afficionado, Alice was a pioneering but now largely forgotten figure from 1920s Melbourne.  Single-handed, she founded of Australia’s first (and only?) ‘all-girl’ motor garage.  She did try to get a job in a regular garage but it’s the 1920s and she is, of course, laughed out the door.