Theatre: A View From the Bridge (★★★★)

By Arthur Miller
Directed by Lawrie Cullen-Tait
Set designer Patrick Howe
Lighting designer Joe Lui
Sound designer Lewis Spragg
Costume designer Molly Werner
Performed by WAAPA 3rd Year acting students
Roundhouse Theatre, WAAPA
30 April – 5 May, 2016

Elle Mickel, Brittany Santariga and Guiseppe Rotondella (pic Jon Green)

The graduating classes in the four WAAPA’s theatre courses will mount eleven public productions this year (three more than our State Theatre Company). If what we’ve seen so far is any guide, it’s a programme you shouldn’t miss.
None will be more unmissable than Lawrie Cullen-Tait’s masterful production of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge.
The play is a room filling with gas from an unlit burner, waiting for a stray spark to ignite it, and Carbone (Guiseppe Rotondella) is as combustible a character as ever walked a stage.
Rotondella belies his 23 years in a performance as a man twice his age of wonderful maturity and strength.
A View From the Bridge is an important work, both in the American theatre canon and as a timely warning of the destructiveness of the walls we build, inside our families and around our communities.
Eddie is a sinner, but he is sinned against as well. He loses his capacity to love, but, as this breathtaking production of a great play shows us, it’s because he loves too much. 
   
Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Death of a Salesman

By Arthur Miller

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Directed by Adam Mitchell

Designed by Trent Suidgeest

Sound design by Ben Collins

Featuring Austin Castiglione, Adriane Daff, Eden Falk, Luke Hewitt, Talei Howell-Price, Josh McConville, Caroline McKenzie, Jo Morris, Ben O’Toole, Igor Sas and John Stanton

Heath Ledger Theatre

Until May 25

Trent Suidgeest

The published text of Arthur Miller’s familiar tragedy of the salesman Willy Loman begins with a description, in unprecedented detail, of its setting. The way the play looks, and what its look says, was clearly important to the writer.

The director of this solid, but only partly satisfying, revival for Black Swan, Adam Mitchell, and his designers, Alicia Clements and Trent Suidgeest, also intend for us to read much, and many things, into their interpretation.

Their vast, grim, set is, at once, a dilapidated industrial space with its grimy central pillar, sparse furniture and gigantic outlet fan, or a neglected railway station concourse, a Mean Central Station, its rows of darkened doors leading to unknown, just as neglected, destinations.

The doors, with their concrete stoops, could be the Loman’s Brooklyn neighborhood, the “solid vault of apartment houses around (Willy’s) small, fragile home” Miller described, but, just as easily, they could be the recesses of Willy’s mind, the holes in his past he escapes to and from that dominate the play.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian