Reviews

Do you remember the movie of many years ago? Well, this brings it alive before our eyes with a good cast in an absorbing production. It is told through the eyes of Chief Bromden, part Indian, who has been in this mental institution for ten years while pretending to be both deaf and unable to speak. The title comes from the last line of a nursery rhyme he was told as a child. The patients are submitted to depraved, humiliating control by Nurse Ratchet who does not hesitate to use shock treatment or a lobotomy, not to cure but to completely dominate and terrorise the patients of the ward.

It’s easy to hear why the Southern Cross Soloists are considered one of Australia’s leading chamber orchestras. Maps and Journeys represents yet another show in which the group both enlightens and entertains with great technique and passion.

This performance took the crowd on a journey through a program of music and oratory themed around the rich wayfinding traditions of our first nations people, compared with the European navigational techniques. Both cultures find common ground in the use of stars and constellations in finding our ways to our destinations.

Kate’s Story is part of an arts event called ‘The Other Side” centred on the problem of homelessness. Victoria Park Centre for the Arts plays host, not only to the play, but to a Perth-centric photography exhibition and a curated musical playlist looking at issues of homelessness, poor mental health, broken family relationships and disturbed childhoods.

Peta Hanrahan has made a theatrical adaptation for four actors of two lectures Virginia Woolf gave at the women’s colleges – Newnham and Girton – at Cambridge University in 1928 on ‘Women and Fiction’.  In 1929, those lectures became the famous book.  The premise is the famous line, ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’