Reviews

An award-winner last year at the Sydney Fringe and a hit recently in Adelaide, ABC Radio movie critic CJ Johnson is back at the Sydney Fringe with his shocking revelations about German film star and sex addict Klaus Kinski.  With images of the star projected behind, CJ stands astride a lectern mostly reading from Kinski’s posthumous and banned 1993 autobiography. 

The theatre company The Last Great Hunt is a living and breathing example that men and women can just occupy an empty space and effectively create visually stunning and engaging theatre. However, the two plays are not only driven by Brook’s principle; in both these plays the simplicity and comradery of the two-hander is also employed to challenge conventional narrative structure and audience address. The experiment is largely successful and establishes itself as a fascinating creative development for these enormously talented theatre practitioners to investigate.

The title Bock Kills her Father, with its suggestion of parricide, immediately had me thinking of The Cenci by Percy Shelly,a disturbing work about incest and murder that was lauded and directed by Antonin Artaud.  I wondered if this aspect of Theatre History inspired writer Adam Cass or perhaps it is the more current sensational stories of the sexual abuse of students by teachers that has informed his intense and weighty piece.

They Saw A Thylacine tells two stories of Tasmanian tigers.  One is in the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart – her story told via the eyewitness account of Alison Reid (Justine Campbell), the zookeeper’s daughter.  Interwoven – or, more accurately, interspersed - with Alison’s tale is the account from an earlier time by a tough, no nonsense bush woman, Beatie or Beatrix (Sarah Hamilton), of her attempt to capture a solitary tiger so as to save and protect her.