Theatre: Playhouse Creatures

By April de Angelis

Her Infinite Variety Ensemble

Directed by Helen Doig

Performed by Tiffany Barton, Rhoda Lopez, Angelique Malcolm, Claire Munday and Summer Williams

The Guild Studio

Until June 8

Tiffany Barton, Angelique Malcolm
and Summer Williams

The British playwright April de Angelis’s Playhouse Creatures is the best kind of historical drama. Firmly based on, but not bound by, real events and characters, it illuminates an era without either lecturing or tutoring.

It's a perfect choice for the all-female Her Infinite Variety Ensemble (HIVE), whose charter is to create opportunities for women in theatre. Beyond its obvious advantages – five strong roles for actresses – it deals with the most elemental opportunity for women in the theatre; the right to be in it at all, which, on the English stage at least, only came a few years before, in 1660. 
To their credit, they’ve had the initiative to turn a disused room in the old Equity Guild building in Claisebrook into a pop-up theatre. It’s fairly rough and ready, and only seats forty, but this instructive and richly entertaining production deserves to fill them. 

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian         

Theatre: Ghosts

By Henrik Ibsen

Class Act Theatre

Directed by Stephen Lee

Performed by Whitney Richards, David Meadows, Graham Mitchell, Angelique Malcolm and Andrew Southern

Subiaco Arts Centre Studio

Until November 3

Who’s afraid of Henrik Ibsen? All that Lutheran hand-wringing. All that rain.

Certainly the audiences that trampled over each other to see Greta Scacchi in Aarne Neeme’s 1991 production of A Doll’s House overcame their qualms, and this production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, in the same building, deserves an audience as well.

Not that it quite justifies trampling; this is a modestly staged production, given a workmanlike rather than inspired treatment by director Stephen Lee, but there’s enough quality on show to make for a worthy evening’s entertainment.