Reviews

Jasper Jones, Craig Silvey’s much loved Australian novel, has been captured for the stage beautifully by Kate Mulvany. In this production by the State Theatre Company of SA, director, Nescha Welk weaves a thought-provoking tapestry amid a standing forest of towering eucalypts.

This play, with a cast of only four, delves into human relationships on various levels of intensity. Added to this are the questions of what constitutes beauty and what is true love. Connections between the play’s two couples disintegrate over the answers to these questions, along with a lack of trust and knowing when to keep the mouth shut. Perhaps it is, in many ways, a mirror of how we all handle the often difficult decisions to be made between the ideals of relationships and the reality of the everyday world.

It’s a bit daunting and scary entering the A Midnight Visit space. But it is well worth taking the challenge of delving into the tortured life and macabre works of Edgar Allen Poe.  Brought to us from Perth and Sydney and presented by Broad Encounters, it’s a real treat to ‘suspend one’s disbelief’ and venture into the dark unknown.  

The play begins with a request from the Translator (Yuchen Wang): ‘Concentrate.’  Good advice since Golden Shield is a complex and demanding but also a very rewarding play.  Its ending is not ‘feel good’, but it is clear: something morally complex has been dramatised for us and it may be grim, but it is satisfying.