Theatre: Hamlet (★★★★½)

Matilda Ridgeway and Josh McConville

By William Shakespeare 
Bell Shakespeare
Director Damien Ryan
Designer Alicia Clements
Lighting designer Mat Cox
Featuring Josh McConville, Matilda Ridgway, Sean O’Shea, Doris Younane, Ivan Donato, Michael Wahr, Philip Dodd, Robin Goldsworthy, Julia Ohannessian and Catherine Terracini
Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
Until August 16

The Prince is on a roll. There are all-night queues for Benedict Cumberbatch’s West End stand, and Bell Shakespeare’s short season at the Heath Ledger is a sell-out.
As it should be.
This Hamlet, with its clear and intelligent direction by Damian Ryan, should completely satisfy both aficionados and newcomers to the greatest of plays. If that’s too bold a claim for the play, there’s no doubting its hero is the first of drama’s characters. He utterly dominates his play, physically and intellectually. He speaks a third of its 4,000 odd lines; it needs no secondary plots or truly independent second lives.

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