Reviews

What an Abbasolutely fabulous night in the theatre, that is as refreshing as a popsicle on a hot summer’s day, with as much heart and warmth as your mother’s baked dinner.  The biggest surprise is that not only are the songs of the famous Swedish quartet seamlessly integrated into the narrative, but that the four band members make frequent return visits as fairy-Godmother like characters.

Written by British actor and playwright Charles Dyer, Wanted – one body! has been staged constantly since its first production in 1961. Set on a stormy night ‘many years ago’ in an old stately home in England, with lots of crashing thunder, flashing lightning, eerie wailing, a sliding panel and the occasional piercing scream, the play has all the essentials of a typical ‘whodunnit’. But, with a couple of disappearing corpses it turns from ‘thriller’ into a crazy mix of comedy and mystery.

Black Swan State Theatre Company’s final production of 2017 is a very dark incarnation of Let the Right One In.

Based on the Swedish novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist and adapted for the stage by Jack Thorne, it tells of Oskar, a 12 year old boy, lonely and bullied, who meets Eli, a mysterious and scruffy teenaged girl. The two form an unlikely but genuine friendship as local police attempt to solve a series of grizzly murders.

Ingmar Bergman’s television mini-series Scenes from a Marriage was said to have been the cause of almost doubling the Scandanavian divorce rates after it was shown in 1973. Over 40 years later his vivid dissection of an emotionally barren and corrosive marriage still packs a powerful punch.