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

Theatre: Clinchfield

By Caleb Lewis

Directed by Andrew Lewis

Musical director/composer Reg Cribb

Set and costume designer Lauren Ross

Performed by WAAPA 3^rd Year acting students

Roundhouse Theatre, WAAPA

16 – 22 March 2012

pic: Jon Green

Clinchfield, Caleb Lewis’s saga of small town hysteria and its consequences, opens the performance series for the 2012 graduating acting class at WAAPA.

As always, it’s an important opportunity for the year’s batch of emerging performers to shine in public.

This production is of particular significance as the first public appearance of the inaugural winner of the Richard Burton Award for New Plays. Prizes are an important incentive in this under-remunerated industry, but the mark of the award, and what Sally Burton is no doubt seeking to foster with it, must surely be works that can be successfully and repeatedly staged in the professional theatre.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian