Theatre: The Talk (★★★½)

The Last Great Hunt
Written and directed by Gita Bezard
Performed by Cassidy Dunn, Megan Hunter and Christina Odam
Until April 21 at the Subiaco Arts Centre
 
The Talk is a departure for Perth’s globetrotting indie theatre collective, The Last Great Hunt.
It’s their first production without any of their six members on stage, yet the performance of the young cast they’ve recruited is shot through with their house style.
The result is the energising and sometimes thrilling humour of surprise as snatches of conversation suddenly turn into song-and-dance routines. The show is very often very funny, but it’s infused with the great sadness of someone all alone in a crowd.
The Talk sometimes ticks off more than it can chew, but the pertinence of the story, the tightness of the production and the energy and talent of the cast makes it well worth paying attention to.

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: In a Bony Embrace (★★★½)

By Gita Bezard
Curtin University Stage One Production
directed by Adam Mitchell
designed by Sally Phipps
performed by Daisy Coyle, Alexander Gerrans, Chelsea Gibson, Sean Guastavino, Anna Lindstedt, Tristan McInnes, Jessica Nyanda Moyle, Kane Parker, Beth Tremlett and Nathan Whitbrook
Blue Room Theatre
December 8 - 12, 2015

The theatre course at Curtin University, in various forms and under various titles, has been producing good work and many very good theatre-makers for decades. Its light may have been obscured by the enormous bushel that WAAPA has become, but that hasn’t stopped the fourth of its Stage One productions, Gita Bezard’s In a Bony Embrace, lighting up the Blue Room in a short season this week.
Bezard, who is one-seventh of indie darlings The Last Great Hunt, and the notable director, Adam Mitchell, have steered this natty ensemble piece and the student actors in its cast to a funny and surprisingly touching destination.
In a Bony Embrace is a work in progress, as are these young actors, and there is, naturally, something of an exercise for students about both its writing and staging.
But that doesn’t detract from what is a genuinely rewarding and entertaining piece of theatre in its own right. 

Read the complete review in The West Australian      

Theatre: Elephents

By Jeffrey Jay Fowler
The Last Great Hunt
Directed by Kathryn Osborne
Designed by Tarryn Gill
Lighting design by Chris Isaacs
Performed by Gita Bezard, Adriane Daff, Jeffrey Jay Fowler, Pete Townsend and Brett Smith.
Blue Room until May 18

Daff, Fowler, Bezard and Townsend (pic: Jamie Breen)

Jeffrey Jay Fowler knows his way round dystopia. In Second Hands, his recent Fringe World outing, humankind had taken vanity and materialism to a horrific extreme. In Elephents the extremity at which we have arrived is apocalyptic, not merely cosmetic.
We are introduced to it in bite-sized pieces. People entering the various dwellings in which the play is set automatically dry off the sweat with towels left by the door for the purpose. Sometimes their clothes are singed. We hear of things combusting spontaneously. Umbrellas are lead-lined. The climate is to die for.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: One Night Echo

The Duck House

Written by Gita Bezard

Directed by Kathryn Osborne

Performed and devised by Alissa Claessens, Brendan Ewing, Fran Middleton, Will O’Mahoney and Tyrone Robinson, with Tim Watts

PICA

November 8 - 17, 2012

Fran Middleton, Brendan Ewing and Alissa Claessens

For students of Greek mythology (and, after a quick refresher course on Wikipedia, us mere mortals), the central conceit of The Duck House’s stylish, brittle party piece at PICA is a delicious game of spot the nymphs and satyrs.

The party in question has been thrown by Theo (Will O’Mahoney), whose unrelenting narcissism gives his eponymous alter-identity away immediately. He’s hired a chick named Echo (google “Echo, Greek mythology”) to serve drinks. The guests arrive; his diffident, intelligent mate Eddie (Brendan Ewing), the magnetic, luminous Celeste (Alissa Claessens) and a lithe, shadowy young man (Tyrone Robinson) with hair swept over like horns. She is Selene, goddess of the moon; they are her lovers Endymion, the astronomer, and Pan, the goat, the god of the wild. This is no safe place for either Echo the nymph or Echo the girl, and, as in the myth, it tears her apart.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian