Reviews

Stray Cats Theatre presented a moving and heartfelt version of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in the intimate Fishtrap Theatre in the Mandurah Performing Arts Centre.

The set design (Karen Francis and Bronwyn White) reminds us that this is a small colonial settlement at the edge of an untamed wilderness, and the frequent British accents reflect the immigrant nature of this colony.

Perplex may well prove to be a show that lives up to its title for most audiences, but director Joh Hartog has come up trumps with this outstanding production: a funny, heady, potent blend of the surreal with the absurd, set within the confines of a seemingly ordinary middle-class dwelling that actually intensifies the strangeness of what transpires there…

Dybbuks is an overwhelming aural and visual experience.  It is difficult to describe because to do so would likely be reductive and because it works – if you allow it –directly on the emotions, bypassing reason or ‘narrative’.  It is more performance art than theatre, more ritual as theatre.  It relies on certain Jewish rituals, but you do not need to be Jewish or know much about Jewish beliefs to be affected by it.  Indeed, the emotions conveyed, or represented, here are, or become in the course of the performance, universal bec

The premise of Fallen – as in ‘a fallen woman’ – is the suppression of women’s stories.  Playwright Seanna van Helten sets her play in a real place, Urania Cottage, where suppression of women’s stories was explicit, stated policy.  Urania Cottage – a ‘home of refuge and reform’, to quote the program notes from writer and director - was set up and overseen by Charles Dickens in the 1840s, to offer ‘young, destitute, underclass women the chance… to begin life afresh…’  But there were two co