Reviews

Chamber Made’s Permission to Speak played Brisbane Powerhouse Theatre as part of the Australian Performing Arts Market (APAM) schedule for 2018. If you’ve not heard of it, APAM showcases contemporary performing arts to the international sector. This work is certainly one you can imagine touring the world. It would be just as at home in a modern art gallery as it is in a theatre or any other number of performance spaces. It’s unsurprising then, to know Chamber Made has presented over 90 performance seasons in Australia and internationally since 1988.

Hats off to the Lane Cove Theatre company for giving one of their loyal members, Rodney Stewart, a chance to revive a musical he penned 40 years ago. At the time (1973) investors splashed out on a fully professional staging of the work under the title Nuclear and lost their dough. The musical lay in the bottom drawer until Rodney dusted it off a decade ago.

The revival production was staged in Lane Cove’s home turf – a hall at the back of a church on Sydney’s north-shore - with a basic set of a double bed, table and computer.

Upstairs in the Balcony Rooms in the Buckingham Arms Hotel there is a little theatrical gem – Dickinson’s Room.

In three small rooms, which have an untold history in themselves, one enters the life, mind and imagination of Emily Dickinson, one of America’s greatest poets.

This unique and engaging piece of theatre is unconventional; as critiqued in Broadway Baby, ‘there is a wonderful sense of freedom to the work. It doesn’t feel pinned to a stage.’

It’s fifty-five years since Joan Littlewood’s company workshopped new lyrics to wartime songs to highlight the brutality and pointlessness of World War I. The juxtaposition of jolly cabaret with the death statistics still packs the proverbial punch.