Reviews

Unlike the murder – mystery novels, which are part of our folklore, and for which Agatha Christie is famous, The Unexpected Guest was written as a play and was first performed in 1958. Although not as well known as her play The Mousetrap, it still offers an intriguing plot that keeps the audience absorbed to the end. It starts on a foggy night when Michael Starkwebber enters the home of the Warwicks through a window in the study. He finds the dead body Richard Warwick and Richard’s wife holding a gun that supposedly killed him.

Annie Baker’s The Antipodes is set in a television ‘writers’ room’.  Having spent a great deal of time in ‘writers’ rooms’ in my career, I wondered how Ms Baker would depict such a thing.  It wasn’t going to be how, say, David Mamet would depict it.  It turns out that her ‘writers’ room’ bears only tenuous resemblance to any real writers’ room in which I have worked – or indeed to any I’ve heard or read about. 

A portion of Osamah Sami’s 2015 memoir Good Muslim Boy has previously been adapted into the successful movie Ali’s Wedding; now this play adaptation takes another part of the book, perhaps the most moving sequence of events in it, the sudden death of his cleric father while on a pilgrimage to Iran and his efforts to bring the body back to Australia against insurmountable obstacles.

The old ‘Christmas Pantos’ in Sydney introduced many kids to the theatre, but until Bonnie Lythgoe saw the ‘niche’ for a winter holiday show for kids, we have missed out on the fun and cheekiness, music and dancing, colour and audience participation that is at the heart of pantomime.