Reviews

There is a certain horrible inevitability about Bad Boy.  We sense with dread where it’s going.  It’s a play about ‘how’ and why’, not about ‘what’.  We know what.  This ‘bad boy’ of the title is not a character: he is, if you like, a representative of the type of man who enacts a series of actions from which he cannot escape – or thinks he cannot.  But Nicci Wilks makes him real: he stands before us in all his pathos – and violence.

Slapdash Galaxy from Victoria’s Bunk Puppets was presented by Wesfarmers Arts and the 2024 AWESOME Festival. Performed to an enthusiastic and very involved audience of all ages, this show is aimed at children five years and over.

The story of brothers Sam and Junior, forced to flee their barren planet, we follow the boys on an epic journey through the galaxy as they battle space pirates, giant spiders and other dangers.

They say it’s the world’s oldest written story, inscribed onto Babylonian clay tablets over three thousand years ago.  Gilgamesh is an ego-driven corrupt ruler who provokes the destruction of his city and forests from vengeful gods, but through love, loss and grief finds his humanity and redemption.

Now this picaresque tale through life and death, travelling between earth and spirits to the limits of the world, is an engrossing new Australian opera.

Hobart has a perfectly wonderful theatre carved into a quarry.  Such a venue must have been the obvious choice for a play set in the shadow of a monolith. The Peacock Theatre was not used but instead the cavernous recess of the undressed stage of the The Playhouse is used to evoke those things that are just out of sight.