Reviews

Much like the river itself after dark, Butterworth’s newest play is deep, mysterious and mesmerising. The restlessness of peripatetic flow is explored through those things we see on the surface, often minutiae and deceptive – the movement of the furniture, the gutting of a fish – but submerged at unfathomable depths there is menace, and secrets, and possibly even danger. And, like the river, the playwright only hints at how deep that menace lies.

Some may question the validity of another revival of Rose’s classic 1950s play about prejudice and  persistence. Those people really need to see this production, and their question will be answered for all time.

Rose’s claustrophobic drama is set in a jury room, and the problem has largely been, for stage, that the audience is too removed to feel truly connected to what is happening. It’s one of the reasons why the film was more successful; it allowed us to get in close, to see the beads of sweat on a top lip – to see the doubt in a man’s eyes.

Can a wild and wonderful animated movie musical translate successfully to the stage? You bet it can; in the hands of Adelaide Youth Theatre, Disney’s Aladdin becomes a genuine treat.

Bernadette Robinson’s one-woman show Songs for Nobodies turned her into a theatrical star, with critics searching for superlatives, wondering where she’d been hiding all these years. So the next idea had to be a good one.

It’s a risky idea too: she and her Australian creative team devised a particularly American show, drawing inevitable comparisons to Broadway and off-Broadway performers, who are, after all, rather good at this kind of thing.