Reviews

This strange combination of commedia dell’arte and opera lends itself to all sorts of imaginative design and action, and this production, first performed in 2005, has all the hallmarks of twenty-first century technical creativity. It is bright and whimsical, with all the zaniness and pace of true comic farce depicted in music that pops and bubbles like a bottle of fizz.

Eleven years ago, Nic Green was working in UK schools with 12-year-olds.  A majority of girls, imagining their future, said their dream was to be ‘a footballer’s wife’.  At the same time, as she says in her program note, Nic Green was making a performance piece with other young girls - girls as young as eight, ‘lost in a fog of self-deprecating negativity…[concerned] about their own bodies and the self-doubt they lived with daily…’

QPAC’s annual Out of the Box festival for kids eight years and younger kicked off yesterday with a strikingly imaginative and effective adaptation of Ethel C. Pedley’s beloved children’s classic Dot and the Kangaroo. Written in 1899, the tale of a young girl Dot who gets lost in the bush and is befriended by a kangaroo has enchanted generations of children for ages.

There’s much to enjoy in Lewis’s new play, developed with the help of Red Stitch’s INK…a worthy in house programme for writers which is in jeopardy after Arts Funding cuts. It’s part Outback Chekhov/part Home and Away in red Dirt, but, despite being an entertaining 90 minutes, the text itself needs a solid dose of subtext and less exposition, more depth and less width, more character and less plot. It simultaneously feels too long, and yet doesn’t allow enough breathing space for us to take in the machinations between characters.