Reviews

Number 18 Eden Avenue is a big, old, historic house. It’s the family home of Sophie who’s a dance teacher, her daughter Poppy who’s nearly 16, and Sophie’s mother Honoria, who’s a little bit eccentric … and confused. There’s a boarder who works at the local post office and raises plants in a greenhouse at the bottom of the garden in his pare time. And a cat that inhabits the ballroom.

There is also a teenager called Simon, who lives next door … and a newly arrived boarder called Gilford, an aspiring actor from the country.

Emma O’Halloran’s operatic adaptation of Mark O'Halloran’s two plays sees a very unique context for two confronting stories. Mary Motorhead (Emily Edmonds, mezzo soprano) is a murderer who brutally stabbed her husband in the head with a 12-inch carving knife. In a solitary and confined space which represents a prison, she reflects on the motivation and circumstances of her chilling crime. Trade depicts an encounter between a Young Man (Callum McGing, tenor) who meets his Older Man (Christopher Hillier baritone) client in a seedy hotel. 

At Opera Queensland’s Studio, Desire and Longing offered something increasingly rare in performance: intimacy without compromise. Xenia Puskarz Thomas and David Belkovski created an atmosphere of startling immediacy, drawing the audience into a world where sensuality, memory and yearning were not merely themes but living forces in the room. In the Studio’s warmly lit cabaret setting, with candles flickering on tables and festoons glowing at the rear of the stage, the atmosphere was both elegant and inviting.

In the hands of the extraordinary storytelling duo Alexander Wright and Phil Grainger, ancient myth becomes something vivid, contemporary and utterly spellbinding. Their production of Eurydice at the stunning Mortlock Chamber as part of the Adelaide Fringe is not merely theatre, it is an experience that lingers long after the final words are delivered.