Theatre: Death in Bowengabbie and The Agony, The Ecstasy and I

Bryce Youngman (pic: Jacinta Lee)

Death in Bowengabbie

By Caleb Lewis

Directed by Matt Edgerton

Performed by Bryce Youngman
The Blue Room

Until May 11

The Agony, the Ecstasy and I

Tarryn Runkel and Laura Hopwood

Directed by Cara Phillips
The Blue Room

Until May 4

Oscar (the terrific Bryce Youngman) has gone back to Bowengabbie, his tiny Tasmanian home town, for a family funeral. The town has been dying since its jam factory closed down, but the identities of Oscar’s youth remain, marooned on their landlocked desert island.  

Trouble is, once one of them dies, they all start popping off. And Oscar keeps having to come back for their funerals.

Bowngabbie is a play that could sustain a cast of five or six, and it’s to the credit of everyone involved that they pull it off so well with only one.     

Tarryn Runkel and Laura Hopwood’s The Agony, the Ecstasy and I, takes on the cult of Apple and its relationship with the gigantic Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China.

Runkel, a dancer, and Hopwood, an actor, have devised a piece with director Cara Phillips that looks at the iconography of Apple and Daisey’s flawed investigation through movement and audio visual imagery, but the show falls between two stools, at times impenetrably obscure and at others in a rather too straightforward documentary style.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian