Reviews

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.

ARENA Arts have presented their ninth Terry Pratchett play, the WA premiere of The Truth, as adapted by Stephen Briggs. Featuring Discworld’s first newspaper, The Ankh-Morpork Times, it shows how “A lie can run around the world before the truth has got its boots on.” Brendan Ellis as William de Worde, accidental newspaper editor, ably leads cast of 19 actors playing 39 named characters, in a nicely measured central performance.

Make Me a Houri dramatises powerful conflicting emotions, profound ambivalence and contradiction – and does so in beautifully written language that is vivid, sharp and poetic.