Reviews

Carly Sheppard returns to the Malthouse stage with an extended and developed version of her show Chase. The performance features a variety of characters that could be described as her alter egos. Sheppard retains much of the subversive and confronting content and her musings cover a range of topics such as intergenerational first nations trauma, environmental disaster and the pervasive and perverse nature of contemporary social media activity. 

Uncle Vanya looks after the run-down house on the family estate. He lives and works there with his mother, Maria, and his niece Sonya. She is the daughter of Vanya’s late sister and the now ageing Serebryakov, who has turned up at the estate with his new – and much younger – wife, Yelena.

Set in London’s Belmarsh Prison, dubbed “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay”, in the high security unit, the high-profile Julian Assange is detained, along with many terrorist suspects held there without charge. Playwright Rosemary Johns was stirred by a PEN event she attended back in 2019, where Human Rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson spoke of freedom of expression in defence of her client Assange. Inspired by the talk, Johns spoke to Robinson, who told her of her conversations with a women’s volunteer group known as the Tea Bar in Belmarsh Prison.

Lead Writer Elise Hearst and Phillip Kavanagh take the structure (more or less) of the classic Dickens story A Christmas Carol but make it the story of a Jewish family and their ghosts, via the clash of Christmas and the contemporaneous Jewish festival of Hanukkah.  They don’t have Dickens’ prose, but they tell a story that is much, much funnier, more real and way less sentimental.