Reviews

As far as Shakespeare goes, As You Like It  may be relatively lacking in serious themes, but this makes it ideal for anyone just up for a cheerful time in a pleasant location. What makes UATG’s production special – and what should prove especially pleasing to buffs of the Bard - is the evident expertise and care that director Megan Dansie and her terrific cast have brought to it.

Broken plays with time, coincidence and consequence.  Events play out of chronological sequence enabling juxtapositions of their emotions.  The audience must hold the pieces in mind – until they come together in a moving and satisfying whole. 

An horrific car accident isn’t a plot point: it’s dramatised in all its physicality, terror and pain.  An abortion isn’t a plot point; it too is dramatised, heightened by the graphic language that describes it, in its agony and regret. 

Melbourne Writers’ Theatre always presents a stimulating and rewarding program.  One doesn’t necessarily attend their shows to watch slick theatre but more pertinently for the satisfaction of exploring, and dwelling, on interesting stories.  Most recently their programs have been comprised of monologues. However this year Six Degrees in Melbourne is made up of six ‘two handers.’  They are set in and around Flinders Lane and each one of them is intriguing.

Noëlle Janaczewska is an Australian playwright, poet and essayist who specialises in writing about people and events that “have been overlooked or marginalised in official records”. In this play she has taken as her inspiration the history of Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest and through it “traces the roots of Sydney’s early Modernist thinking and offers a fresh take on Emu Plains in the 1950s”.