Reviews

Caress/Ache is a touching, beautifully acted piece from WAAPA’s 3rd Year Acting Students, superbly designed built and crewed by WAAPA Production and Design students. A moving production that was sadly under-attended on opening night.

Playwright Suzie Miller wrote Caress/Ache in response to the execution of Van Tuong Nguyen in Singapore in 2005, inspired by the cruelty not only of the execution, but the cruel order not to allow his mother to hug him before his death sentence was carried out. This play explores the sense of touch.

Eliza Doolittle is famously transformed in the play Pygmalion from a cockney Covent Garden flower seller into the toast of English high society.

In the case of Anna O’Byrne, her transformation was from playing second violin in a high school production of My Fair Lady, listening to the tapping feet of her sister in the lead role on the stage above her head, to scoring the part of Eliza, under the direction of Dame Julie Andrews.

Celebrating Redland Museum’s 50th Anniversary, Reedy River - the Queensland Day Play for 2022 presented by Theatre Redlands - is an Australian bush musical that is ‘as warm as a handshake’.

It’s an age-old story, now with more teeth thanks to MeToo alerts – an illicit sexual relationship between an esteemed academic and novelist and his awed teenage student.

Canadian writer Hannah Moscovitch however steps us back from predictable outrages by telling us her story through male eyes.  Jon even speaks to us in the third person, from his desk of power and celebrity, or pacing the stage in guilt and moral fence-sitting.