Reviews

Perplex may well prove to be a show that lives up to its title for most audiences, but director Joh Hartog has come up trumps with this outstanding production: a funny, heady, potent blend of the surreal with the absurd, set within the confines of a seemingly ordinary middle-class dwelling that actually intensifies the strangeness of what transpires there…

Dybbuks is an overwhelming aural and visual experience.  It is difficult to describe because to do so would likely be reductive and because it works – if you allow it –directly on the emotions, bypassing reason or ‘narrative’.  It is more performance art than theatre, more ritual as theatre.  It relies on certain Jewish rituals, but you do not need to be Jewish or know much about Jewish beliefs to be affected by it.  Indeed, the emotions conveyed, or represented, here are, or become in the course of the performance, universal bec

The premise of Fallen – as in ‘a fallen woman’ – is the suppression of women’s stories.  Playwright Seanna van Helten sets her play in a real place, Urania Cottage, where suppression of women’s stories was explicit, stated policy.  Urania Cottage – a ‘home of refuge and reform’, to quote the program notes from writer and director - was set up and overseen by Charles Dickens in the 1840s, to offer ‘young, destitute, underclass women the chance… to begin life afresh…’  But there were two co

On the morning of this concert when told his leading lady, Lucy Durack, was suffering from a throat infection and couldn’t sing, the ever-resourceful conductor Patrick Pickett found a replacement. And what a replacement she was, Brisbane born Aria winner and international star of Andre Rieu’s concerts since 2007, Mirusia.