Reviews

The Curators independent theatre company began in Brisbane two years ago and this their fourth play is a mythical masterpiece.

Director Michael Beh has been working towards his adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts for the better part of 25 years.

He ekes out the realism, symbolism and theatricality of Ibsen’s work and traps all these elements in the pressure-cooker environment of a small pop up theatre off Waterworks Rd at Red Hill.

I have never felt such a buzz at any theatrical event, amateur or professional. Tickets for Les Misérables presented at the Lighthouse Theatre Warrnambool sold quickly for a six performance season. This final night crowd was anticipating big things from Holiday Actors and Warrnambool Theatre Company’s first collaboration.

This is a sprawling but spritely adaptation of Andrea Levy’s multiple award-winning novel.  Beginning in the colony of Jamaica before WWII, it tells an epic story of Jamaican Hortense (Leah Harvey), Englishwoman Queenie (Aisling Loftus) and Jamaican Gilbert (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr), across a span of ten years.  Smart, pale-skinned little Hortense (Keira Chansa) is separated from her beloved grandmother and installed in the fundamentalist Christian, middle-class family of her uncle and status-obsessed aunt.  Intended to give Hortense a ‘better future’, this mo

The audience was greeted with a blank stage – a model aeroplane was carried playfully by the cast, circling then ‘crashing’ onto the remote island where only English schoolboys have survived the accident. Bit by bit the stagecraft built. The cast thrillingly pass the conch from player to player as though they were a polished Rugby team. A scaffolding was wheeled in to signify the mountain where the boys soon climbed and lit a look out fire.