Reviews

‘Child loss is a loss like no other. The loss of a child is a grief that lasts forever.’ (Angela Miller – grief counselling blogger). A potent statement and the theme of Rabbit Hole, presented by Joh Hartog Productions.

Rabbit Hole by David Linsday-Abaire is a 2007 Pulitzer prize winning play (first presented in 2006) and was famously made into a film of the same name in 2010 starring Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart.

M.C. Escher, the Dutch artist who explored concepts of alternate realities, impossible objects and infinity in his works, provided the inspiration for Dawson Nichols’ Escher’s Hands.  Named for Escher’s well-known artwork ‘Drawing Hands’, which depicts two hands drawing each other, Escher’s Hands explores ideas of control, of cause and effect and of freewill.

Australian playwright Wendy Beckett’s tribute to twentieth century French artist Camille Claudel premiered in French, in Paris, at the Théâtre de l'Athénée Louis Jouvet in 2018 in the midst of the #MeToo movement.

Think about it! An Australian playwright dramatizing the work of a famous female French artist, but one who was terribly ill-used by the society of the time. How did the critics react, I wondered? Here are just a few snippets of what they said:

A piece all powerful in its subtlety …  (Publik Art Review)

The Ensemble Theatre revisits this 1995 Melbourne play under the banner of Australian Classic, and I can see why. It has played in London and New York and just about everywhere else. Author Joanna Murray-Smith has given an assured take on comfortable middle class marriage and its essential failure to deliver happiness to all concerned: wife, husband, daughter and interloper.