Reviews

Empathic, hilarious, and incorporating song and dance, Joanna Murray-Smith’s Bombshells is a wonderful choice for Echo Theatre’s Jordan Best’s superb comedic sense and feminist outlook. Murray-Smith has an ability to capture heartbreakingly authentic emotional dialogue, which is a large part of the global success of her play Honour. In Bombshells, she takes that dialogue internal to create a wry comedy about the lies we tell ourselves and the ways we survive life’s traumas.

The Bugalugs Bum Thief is a delightfully funny stage production catering to kids and families. Riverside Theatres has presented a genuinely entertaining show with Red Line Productions. 

The title makes the intent and purpose of this show absolutely clear.  The play begins in darkness with an angry poem projected on the walls and on three huddled women.  It’s a protest at the invisibility of older women.  Women of a certain age will recognise this at once: so disregarded that they are almost literally invisible in public spaces – so that younger individuals will bump into them or force them off the pavement and into the gutter.  It’s not just their bodies: the invisibility extends to their life experience, sexuality, opinions and wisdom

Emma O’Brien and Olivia O’Brien combine, weave together, and segue between ‘fact’ (or what Jane Austen made of it in letters to her sister Cassandra) and fiction.  ‘Fiction’ being how Jane Austen turned life – what she observed and what she felt - into art.  Specifically here, the much-adapted Pride and Prejudice.  There is not a word in the O’Briens’ text that does not come from Jane’s hand.  And that text weaves into and out of the music of her time that Jane Austen transcribed - from children’s