Reviews

Straight White Men manages the rare feat of being both a deep, thought-provoking piece of social commentary and a side-splittingly funny comedy that leaves the audience feeling invigorated by its wildly impassioned energy. Korean-American playwright Young Jean Lee cleverly deconstructs both contemporary notions of masculinity and white privilege, but without being condescendingly preachy or completely unsympathetic.

The deepest depths of the sea. Far-flung reaches of outer space. A space disco.

Quite a curious recipe for a performance.

This production is unlike anything else I've seen.

Usually,when a reviewer says that, it’s code that means, ‘The performance is a nonsensical mess.’ That’s not the case with Beneath and Beyond.

Splat! returns to Spare Parts Puppet Theatre this school holidays and is a high energy celebration of play, friendship and imagination.

Puppeteer actors, Rebecca Bradley, dressed in yellow and emerging from a triangle and Immanuel Dado, wearing red, with a penchant for squares, befriend  Yvan Karlsson, who wears blue and appears from a circle. Together they use dance, acrobatics clowning and puppetry to explore relationships between the objects around them and with each other, and at one stage take us on a mesmerising journey through space.

To say that truth is stranger than fiction is a mere homily when one looks at the story behind this fascinating play. Yes, a woman of slight build did murder her fat, deaf and dumb, cousin in 1949… or says she did. But how could she dismember the body and subsequently throw pieces from the railway bridge under trains? And what happened to the head?