Reviews

Any latent desire (by an adult) to return to childhood can be fulfilled by seeing a Terrapin Puppet Theatre production for children. That was my recent experience when I took myself along to see Red Racing Hood at the Theatre Royal Backspace. Terrapin’s Red Racing Hood is not so much a reworking (or reimagining) of Little Red Riding Hood, as a nod to the well known and loved children’s story.

Keith Huff became my hero when I knew he wrote Mad Men and the brilliant House of Cards.  His expertise at storytelling and snappy dialogue is also on show at Sydney’s Old Fitz with A Steady Rain, a two hander about a couple of longtime partners patrolling the hardened streets of Chicago.

Toni’s grant application (for something undoubtedly very artistic) is refused.  Toni is so stunned that she is, well, speechless.  But undeterred, she contacts Sara (whom she has never met) far away in Rome and invites her to join the project.  It’s a project, Toni asserts, that ‘is going to make millions’.  Sara likes the sound of ‘millions’, but otherwise exhibits not a shred of comprehension of Toni’s project – and we’re not too sure what it is either.  Possibly Toni herself hasn’t quite got it

Belvoir’s new artistic director Eamon Flack both scripted and directed this remarkable reworking of Chekhov's first full-length play.  With a strong comic cast who capture both the pathos and full ridiculousness of Chekhov's lost characters, Flack’s rollicking but sensitive production reaches beyond pre-revolutionary Russia to our Australia today.  The actors somehow inhabit both worlds, and so point to what we have in common, as our social progress also falters into inertia and the only bottom line is economic growth.