Reviews

This oddly titled play is about addiction, mainly to alcohol, but also sexual addiction to the boss’s wife. Exclude addiction from your life, it warns, and you might also exclude real intensity and passion. Directed with particular passion by Mark Kilmurry, this three-hander by David Hare delivers a handsome and unexpected punch.

If you have friends who’ve seen this intriguing, exciting, challenging show, tell them shut-up; you’ll see it for yourself, thanks very much.  To describe it in too much detail doesn’t mean giving away some brilliant plot twist.  It means giving away not one but two remarkable coups de theatre. 

Even a fire alarm and evacuation on opening night at the Hayes could only briefly pause the energy and enthusiasm. Raw and vibrant, Rent returns joyously to it’s Off-Broadway roots at Sydney’s Hayes Theatre Co.

Rent borrows its plot from La Boheme, transporting the bohemian characters to New York’s East Village in the early 1990s, where the artistic community is being ravaged by HIV/AIDS and threatened by gentrification, re-setting the operatic plot with a rock musical theatre score.

Josh McConville unfortunately was too ill to perform his lead as Hamlet on the opening night I attended. Understudy Scott Sheridan put in a magnificent performance in McConville’s place. If you didn’t know Sheridan was the understudy, you’d never guess. His performance is a psychological case study, moving from maddened with the loss of his father through to flagrantly insane, and there are moments when his mood changes instantaneously. He papers over his misery with humour bordering on hysteria—his clowning is darkly funny, but also alarming.