Theatre: A Circle of Buzzards (★★★)

Written by Nathaniel Moncrieff
Directed by Joe Lui
Performed by Austin Castiglione, Jeremy Mitchell and Ella Hetherington
PICA
Until 21 Feb

In Steve Earle’s song, A Gringo’s Tale, two American men strike up a conversation at a bar in an out-of-the-way Mexican town. One is a tourist; the other is a fugitive, hiding from some shadowy CIA operatives.
Substitute Australians for Americans, Spain for Mexico and an Australian mining company called The Saetón Group for the CIA and you’ve got the set-up for Nathaniel Moncrieff’s tidy little thriller, A Circle of Buzzards.
What Earle neglected, and Moncrieff has made the engine of his narrative, is the identity of the tourist, and his reasons for being in the bar plying his companion with drinks.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Second Hands

Little y Theatre
Written and directed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler
Developed and performed by Austin Castiglione, Nick Maclaine, Holly Garvey, Georgia King and Renee Newman-Storen
For Fringe World
PICA until Feb 22

I suggested to some people who had just seen Jeffrey Jay Fowler’s ghoulish suburban comedy, Second Hands, that he could be the next David Williamson.
They were horrified that I would consign such an adventurous young writer to the remainder bin of Australian theatre, trotting out middlebrow current affairs dramas to pad out the subscription brochures of the state theatre companies, but they rather missed the point.
Which is that Fowler has the rare gift of writing genuinely funny, genuinely sharp dinner-table dialogue, and the ability to ratchet it up and down the emotional scale from banter to desperation at will. Only time will tell how Fowler chooses to use his ability; what’s indisputable is that he’s got it, and in spades.

Theatre: the Motherfucker with the Hat

Black Swan State Theatre Company

for Fringe World

Written by Stephen Adly Guirgis

Directed by Adam Mitchell

Designed by Bryan Woltjen

Lighting design by Trent Suidgeest

Sound design by James Luscombe

Featuring Rhoda Lopez, Austin Castiglione, Kenneth Ransome, Fayssal Bazzi and Alison van Reeken

The Studio, State Theatre Centre

Until February 3

It’s a delicious irony that Black Swan’s first productions for 2013 are the staple crowd-puller, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Stephen Adly Guirgis’s incendiary The Motherfucker with the Hat.

They seem as far apart as two plays can get, yet, at their heart, they share the joy of language beautifully crafted and a fascination with human duplicity and its unraveling.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian