Reviews

Peter Carey’s novel Jack Maggs reimagines Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations through more modern sensibilities and the viewpoint of the ex-convict rather than the child.  Dickens’s fearsome Abel Magwitch has become Jack Maggs, and the child Pip has become Henry Phipps.  Samuel Adamson’s adaptation of the novel into a play cleverly frames it within an 1879 stage production that presents the “true story” of the events of 1837.  This allowed the framing play’s narrator intermittent engagement with the (1879) fictitiou

Derek Deane’s The Lady of the Camellias, performed by Shanghai Ballet at QPAC’s Lyric Theatre, was an unforgettable portrayal of love, sacrifice, and redemption, told through breathtaking dance and exquisite artistry. Based on Alexandre Dumas fils’ celebrated novel, this production seamlessly wove the elegance of classical ballet with the raw emotion of its timeless story.

To begin The Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams writes within Tom’s opening lines: “The play is memory.  Being a memory play, it is dimly lighted, it is sentimental, it is not realistic...”  acknowledging the play as a work of art rather than a rigidly true account.  Tom introduces his sister and mother and the anticipated “gentleman caller” (directed in an appealing, choreographic fashion) while poetically opining his own fate and the state of the world.

Aidan Fennessy was dying of cancer when he wrote this excellent Australian play. Caught in Melbourne’s complex response to COVID, he never saw it produced by the MTC in 2022 when planned. But now it has arrived in Sydney as the Christmas production at the Ensemble and the local audience showed its lusty approval with lengthy and thunderous applause. 

While singing in a choir, said Fennessy, ‘each character can hold their differences and be together at the same time.’ And his play goes on to prove that dictum in spades.