Reviews

A true-blue Aussie is our Schapelle Corby, sentenced to twenty years for smuggling 4.2kg of marijuana in her boogie board bag. The new comedy show by Alex Hines To Schapelle And Back, in all its crazy mayhem, is a fuzzy expose about the tacky Australian Media and their piranha-like tactics for a news story, while raising issues around trauma.

With terrifying realism, punctuated with moments of stylized beauty both sublime and dreadful, Alchemy Artistic’s debut production The Boys is a meticulously crafted exploration of masculinity at its most toxic. Loosely based on Anita Cobby’s murder, the horror here is not in graphic violence but in the hyperreal presentation of male brutality, an emotional landscape increasingly bulging with anger which devastates all when it erupts.

This play pokes gentle fun at the attempt to lead four high-profile, self-absorbed people to understand the impact of their actions and choices on others. They have been forced to do empathy training and the process used to try to develop some understanding in them forms the content of the play.

Alana Valentine gives voice to stirring stories of outsiders who, rejected by mainstream religion, chose instead to be married by Ted Noffs at his famous Wayside Chapel in Kings Cross.  Noff’s Methodist superiors took a dim view of him prioritising social need over doctrine, and his defence against charges of heresy is Valentine’s main story.