Theatre: The Seagull

Black Swan State Theatre Company
by Anton Chekhov
adapted by Hilary Bell
Directed by Kate Cherry
Designed by Fiona Bruce
With Adam Booth, Rebecca Davis, Leila George, Michael Loney, Andrew McFarlane, Luke McMahon, Greg McNeill, Sarah McNeill, Ben Mortley and Greta Scacchi

Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
Until August 31
 
This remounting of The Seagull, Anton Chekhov’s great first play, owes much to a modest, approachable adaptation by Hillary Bell, effectively executed by its director, Kate Cherry.
Bell, who has no Russian, has interpreted several English translations of the play made over the past century—if this sounds like “adaptation by committee”, Bell seems to be happy to live, and Cherry to work, with it.
The result stays loyal to its roots—we remain by a Russian lake, not in an Australian beach house or a Long Island estate. The characters speak in their own accents, but traditional representations of the Russian idiom remain. They are dressed, by the designer Fiona Bruce, as per fin de siècle Russia, and her set, a stripped-down proscenium, is like many that have housed the play in the past 120 years. 
So this Seagull is not spectacular, or edgy, but it is handsome and approachable. If it’s something of museum piece, that’s not the worst charge that can be levelled at a work of its significance in theatre history.


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Glengarry Glen Ross

By David Mamet

Little y Theatre

Directed by Mark Storen

Designed by Fiona Bruce

Featuring Georgia King, Ella Hetherington, Caris Eves, Holly Garvey, Leanne Curran, Alexandra Nell and Verity Softly

Music by Andrew Weir and Ben Collins

Blue Room Theatre

Until December 8

Leanne Curran and Georgia King

There’s a reason Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s Pulitzer, Olivier and Tony award-winning 1984 drama, is having major revivals all across the US.

It can be found in the forsaken suburban tracts and vacated foreclosures that have hollowed out many American cities, so much like the worthless developments that Mamet’s salesman are hawking to their unsuspecting clients.

Little y Theatre’s production at the Blue Room has an all-female cast (although it’s required to use the script’s male character names and pronouns). Even if you’re not a devotee of gender-swapping theatre, a revival of a play about real estate is as appropriate a place as any to do it.

Theatre: Boy Gets Girl

Black Swan State Theatre Company
Written by Rebecca Gilman

Directed by Adam Mitchell

Designed by Fiona Bruce

Lighting design by Trent Suidgeest

Sound design by Ben Collins

Featuring James Hagan, Ben O’Toole, Myles Pollard, Whitney Richards, Helen Searle, Steve Turner and Alison van Reeken

 Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

Until September 30

Alison van Reeken and Myles Pollard

 The opening tableaux of the American playwright Rebecca Gilman’s gripping, malevolent Boy Gets Girl is a striking display of the strengths of director Adam Mitchell’s production.

We find Theresa Bedell (Alison van Reeken), a New York City magazine feature writer, in a set (superbly designed by Fiona Bruce) that is an abstract exercise in perspective, diminishing up a raked stage and down lines of massive re-enforced concrete sections towards a vanishing point obscured in shadows. There’s music, and traffic, but somewhere, close by, Theresa thinks she hears a noise, senses a presence; and we do too. She walks warily upstage towards the darkness, peering into it for the intruder. The stage fades to black. Welcome to her nightmare.