Reviews

Annie Baker’s The Antipodes is set in a television ‘writers’ room’.  Having spent a great deal of time in ‘writers’ rooms’ in my career, I wondered how Ms Baker would depict such a thing.  It wasn’t going to be how, say, David Mamet would depict it.  It turns out that her ‘writers’ room’ bears only tenuous resemblance to any real writers’ room in which I have worked – or indeed to any I’ve heard or read about. 

A portion of Osamah Sami’s 2015 memoir Good Muslim Boy has previously been adapted into the successful movie Ali’s Wedding; now this play adaptation takes another part of the book, perhaps the most moving sequence of events in it, the sudden death of his cleric father while on a pilgrimage to Iran and his efforts to bring the body back to Australia against insurmountable obstacles.

The old ‘Christmas Pantos’ in Sydney introduced many kids to the theatre, but until Bonnie Lythgoe saw the ‘niche’ for a winter holiday show for kids, we have missed out on the fun and cheekiness, music and dancing, colour and audience participation that is at the heart of pantomime.

Does a ‘normal family’ hold hands and say grace before the evening meal?  The family in Anthea Greco’s new play does.  That this ritual will turn out to be a veneer hiding some cruel and dirty secrets is her point.  The prayer over, patriarch Bill (Stephen Francis) carps and grumbles, and chivvies the kids: the eldest, grown-up lawyer Nikki (Faran Martin) and teen son Tom (Louis Corbett).  Meanwhile, daughter Laura (Tasha Sanders), who has a mental disability, reacts to the continually blaring television.  Christine (Annie Stanford) is the ineffect