Reviews

Director Danielle Mass has brought Orton’s provocative attack on hypocrisy somersaulting into 2018 with her cunning cross casting and precision-based direction. She has swept together the farce and the facetious in a production that heightens Orton’s comic genius – and the contemporary relevance of the inequalities that he satirised so subversively … and so well.

On the smell of an oily rag comes the Brave New World Theatre Company’s production of Lie With Me by Liz Hobart. They’ve been at it for over 2 years and the programme lists 23 people, including the three current actors, who have contributed to the script. With a setting that consists of thrown together bits and pieces – chairs, microphones, a projector, a table covered with clothes that becomes a body in a hospital – the Sound Design of Ben Hinchley is the hero here.

Aidan Fennessy’s The Architect is a comedy drama about dying – and dying with dignity - but it’s also, almost as much, about class.  Helen (Linda Cropper), a retired literature teacher, and her lawyer partner John (Nicholas Bell), both in their sixties, live in a spacious, open plan house in a leafy suburb.  But Helen has inoperable brain tumours.  John wants to go to an event in England but of course doesn’t want to leave her alone.  She’ll need a carer and if the right one can’t be found, he won’t go. 

McNirt Hates Dirt is an adorable mini-musical at Perth’s Awesome Arts Festival for Bright Young Things. This lovely short show is aimed at the very smallest of bright young things, with a suggested age of 3-5 years, and winning over many even younger than that.