Reviews

Merciless Gods tells merciless stories.  There are eight stories here, each with its own burden of pain, each one taking the audience (if we care to go) into depths of sorrow, into places and emotions that are faced unflinchingly.  The stories are linked by theme and some characters recur.  As we might expect, many of the characters are of first generation non-Anglo ethnicity and gay – outliers, misfits and desperates.  This is not an easy night of theatre; it is confronting, even threatening, in its dark truthfulness.     

Michele Lee writes plays only about women of colour.  And that’s just fine: there’s enough already about the white blokes.  Rice is about an ambitious, self-obsessed executive working for Australia’s largest rice producer, the granddaughter of a West Bengal immigrant, and a Chinese cleaner with heaps of her own business and family problems.

2017 marks the 60th anniversary of the Queensland Conservatorium and what better way to celebrate than to bring together students from the Griffith University musical theatre course and the conservatorium in a production of West Side Story which also turns 60 this year.

Alison Richards has a gentle voice and presence in this quietly fragmented space. The staging of this performance is unique and borrows from theatre, opera, installation and performance art. The attention to detail and the meticulous aesthetics are very pleasing. Each aspect of the setting elicits the idea of a life full of history and memories and how our surroundings are a constant reminder of who we are, where we have been and where we may be headed.