Reviews

Broken plays with time, coincidence and consequence.  Events play out of chronological sequence enabling juxtapositions of their emotions.  The audience must hold the pieces in mind – until they come together in a moving and satisfying whole. 

An horrific car accident isn’t a plot point: it’s dramatised in all its physicality, terror and pain.  An abortion isn’t a plot point; it too is dramatised, heightened by the graphic language that describes it, in its agony and regret. 

Melbourne Writers’ Theatre always presents a stimulating and rewarding program.  One doesn’t necessarily attend their shows to watch slick theatre but more pertinently for the satisfaction of exploring, and dwelling, on interesting stories.  Most recently their programs have been comprised of monologues. However this year Six Degrees in Melbourne is made up of six ‘two handers.’  They are set in and around Flinders Lane and each one of them is intriguing.

Noëlle Janaczewska is an Australian playwright, poet and essayist who specialises in writing about people and events that “have been overlooked or marginalised in official records”. In this play she has taken as her inspiration the history of Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest and through it “traces the roots of Sydney’s early Modernist thinking and offers a fresh take on Emu Plains in the 1950s”.

Waiting at the tram stop after a performance of Moral Panic, I overheard a young woman say excitedly to a friend, ‘Did you see that?  It just got to me on so many levels!’  I agree.  Moral Panic may not make ‘sense’ in terms of the logic the playwright and director Bridget Balodis wish to eschew, but the play does ‘get to you on so many levels’.  There are passages where I struggled to get the literal meaning of what was happening on stage, but something – a line, an image, a suggested emotion – keeps gett