Reviews

Greeted by a red morph suited woman with newspaper for hair and balloons for breasts, the audience were coerced into a 166 year old house in The Rocks for a theatrical experience like no other. Described by multiple audience members as resembling ‘Teletubbies on ice,’ this sensory overload hits closer to home regarding society’s issues than initially expected. 

Sandra Fiona Long comes down the La Mama stairs and stands half turned away in the corner.  She’s tentative, scared and almost apologetic.  An authoritarian voice comes from the PA system, ordering Ms Long to display a list of various emotions, ending with Love.  The audience will love Love, says the voice.  Ms Long has a comic stab at it – the exaggerated effort plain to see – but of course ‘emotions’ disconnected from any context, situation, action or person are meaningless, so how can she possibly convey them? 

“Alive and living in this time and place."

A quote from the Griffin Awards winning play, Turquoise Blue by Stephen Carleton

2015 marks the eighteenth year that Griffin Theatre and Copyright Agency Limited have awarded $10,000 to a new Australian writer for their work. This is still a prestigious award. 

Vanessa O’Neil’s search for Owen Roe takes her all the way back to ‘Red’ Owen Roe, a firebrand freedom fighter against Cromwell’s campaign to subdue Ireland in the 17th century.  It’s a search that became, by her own admission, obsessive, and she dramatises that in the opening sequence of this one-woman show: poring over photocopies of documents and newspaper clippings and maps in the middle of sleepless nights.  She’s aided too by a map of Ireland on one wall and her family tree on the opposite wall – although the family