Reviews

Based on a true story, this play recounts the long-term friendship between performer Tania McNaughton and Ute Dahike. Their friendship spans decades and media platforms. They started out as teenage pen friends in two remote and distant places: Tania in New Zealand and Ute in East Germany.

A trip back to the dance halls of WWII Australia – the good times and the not so good.  The big band sound, the waltz, the foxtrot, the quickstep, the Gypsy Tap…  Women’s work in factories, laundries, homes.  Dressing up for a bit of fun on a Saturday night.  The letters from faraway places: ‘Dear Ida… Of course, I can’t say where we are…’  In the newspapers, the casualty lists.  The priest delivering the telegrams.  The wowsers.  The ridiculous claims of no alcohol, and no sex at the dances

The Velveteen Rabbit is somewhat of a stalwart for Spare Parts Puppet Theatre, but the latest incarnation feels particularly poignant given the current pandemic. The original book, which features a young child, very ill, was written in 1922, in the wake of the Spanish Flu Pandemic – although the child has scarlet fever, which probably harks to the British Scarlet Fever epidemic of Margery Williams’ childhood.

International choreographer Yuri Possokhov and his Russian composer Ilya Demutsky have created a beautifully dark, modern retelling of Tolstoy’s great classic. 

So unrelenting is its narrative, so psychological its tone, that these dancers also must be fine actors. Robyn Hendricks as Anna Karenina, who sacrifices all for a passion which doesn’t last, and Callum Linnane as her remorseful lover, Vronsky, excel at both.