Reviews

A wealthy but childless woman adopts five babies: from Vietnam, Nicaragua, Sudan, Bosnia and Australia.  She has a big heart.  Thus begins Patricia Cornelius’ and Susie Dee’s layered, ironic, subtly angry take on colonialism, privilege and the idea of ‘motherhood’.  But this writer and this director are too smart and too skilled in theatre craft to present a polemic or a tract.  Big Heart is ambivalent, ambiguous and deeply unsettling.  A hush falls over the audience; we are still.  We can see what’s happening, we understa

Eliza Winstanley was a Sydney actress and star of the Australian theatre in the 1830s who later went on to ‘tread the boards’ in the UK and the USA, and became a writer, editor and novelist.  Jane Woollard’s play about her life, Miss W Treads, employs the framing device of a playwright, Imogene (Ruby Johnson), researching and struggling to write a play about Winstanley’s life.  Although seemingly blocked, Imogene feels such an intense connection – or identification - with her subject that Winstanley (Fanny Hanusin) – and her Irish husba

It is the 1950s In China. The Red Guard is on the rampage, destroying churches, missions and their schools and orphanages and forcing their congregations to join the fervor of the revolution. Many of the missionaries, priests and nuns suffer violence at the hands of the Guard: physical beatings, cruel forms of restraint, even death.

The Marvelous Wonderettes uses a compilation of songs from the 50’s and 60’s to tell the story of four college seniors who are asked to perform at their senior prom when the headline act cancels at short notice.

Act 1 sees them at the prom where we learn about their dreams and aspirations for the lives ahead of them. Act 2 finds the same four later at their ten year reunion.