Theatre: A View From the Bridge (★★★★)

By Arthur Miller
Directed by Lawrie Cullen-Tait
Set designer Patrick Howe
Lighting designer Joe Lui
Sound designer Lewis Spragg
Costume designer Molly Werner
Performed by WAAPA 3rd Year acting students
Roundhouse Theatre, WAAPA
30 April – 5 May, 2016

Elle Mickel, Brittany Santariga and Guiseppe Rotondella (pic Jon Green)

The graduating classes in the four WAAPA’s theatre courses will mount eleven public productions this year (three more than our State Theatre Company). If what we’ve seen so far is any guide, it’s a programme you shouldn’t miss.
None will be more unmissable than Lawrie Cullen-Tait’s masterful production of Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge.
The play is a room filling with gas from an unlit burner, waiting for a stray spark to ignite it, and Carbone (Guiseppe Rotondella) is as combustible a character as ever walked a stage.
Rotondella belies his 23 years in a performance as a man twice his age of wonderful maturity and strength.
A View From the Bridge is an important work, both in the American theatre canon and as a timely warning of the destructiveness of the walls we build, inside our families and around our communities.
Eddie is a sinner, but he is sinned against as well. He loses his capacity to love, but, as this breathtaking production of a great play shows us, it’s because he loves too much. 
   
Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Venus in Fur

By David Ives
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Director and costume designer Lawrie Cullen-Tait
Set designer Patrick Howe
Lighting designer Joe Lui
Sound designer and composer Brett Smith
With Adam Booth and Felicity McKay
STC Studio
Until February 8

(★★★★½)

Felicity McKay (pic: Gary Marsh)

It’s the end of a long, dismal day for the director Thomas Novachek. He’s auditioning actresses for his adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novella Venus in Furs, and no-one’s come close to nailing the part.

He’s packing up to leave when a girl called Vanda Jordan bursts in, overcoat and duffle bag, blonde hair dishevelled: “Am I too late? I’m too late, right? Fuck. Fuck!” (that last expletive somehow extended to three syllables).

It’s a fabulous entrance and a taste of what’s to come in David Ives’ delicious layer cake of a play-within-a-play-within-a-book, Venus in Fur.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Picasso's Goldfinch

Written by Tom Jeffcote

Directed and designed by Lawrie Cullen-Tait

Performed by Andrew Hale and Tiffany Barton

The Blue Room

Until November 17

“They ought to put out the eyes of painters as they do goldfinches, in order that they can sing better.” The famous, if a little woolly-headed, quote from Picasso is the reference point for Tom Jeffcote’s story of a painter and the women who shape his life.

Theatre: Red Silk and Luminaire

Red Silk

by Lois Achimovich

Directed by Aarne Neeme

With Roz Hammond, Dan Luxton and Luke Hewitt

Luminaire

Renegade Productions

Writer, director and lighting designer Chris Donnelly

Sound designer Joe Lui

With Alexa Taylor and Jeremy Mitchell

Blue Room Theatre

13 – 31 March 2012

The American poet, Anne Sexton, is little remembered today, but in the 1960s her Pulitzer Prize-winning confessional poetry bridged the gap between her greater friend, and fellow suicide, Sylvia Plath, and the introspective singer songwriters that rose to prominence around the time of her death in 1974. She was a star, and she burned like one.

Red Silk, Lois Achimovich’s play about Sexton, directed by the distinguished Aarne Neeme, does a fine job of historical fiction recounting the poet’s psychological decline in the late ’60s. Roz Hammond plays her large: flirtatious, magnetic and lugubrious. Luke Hewitt and Dan Luxton, as the conflicted psychiatrists who treat and exploit her, give strong supporting performances. Lawrie Cullen-Tait’s economic design, especially her leading lady’s hubba-hubba little grey dress, nails the period nicely (Hammond could walk into series five of Mad Men without batting a socket-lined eyelid).

Theatre: Music from the Whirlwind

by John Aitken

Directed and designed by Lawrie Cullen-Tait

Performed by Brendan Ewing

The Metcalfe Playhouse

3 – 5 November, 2011

Theatre should give us entertainment, emotion and education. Whatever else you say about the revival of Music from the Whirlwind, WA playwright John Aitken’s powerful exposé of the dangerous relationship between Dmitri Shostakovich and the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, it certainly delivers on the last of these. Brendan Ewing, the edgy, distinctive actor who plays the Russian composer in this single hander, provides plenty of the others.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Red

By John Logan
Onward Production

Directed and designed by Lawrie Cullen-Tait

Featuring James Hagan and Will O’Mahony

Subiaco Arts Centre

Until August 27

Biographical theatre needs to be approached with caution. It’s a brave writer who tries to draw drama from a real life, especially a famous one, and a brave actor who attempts to represent that life.

The currency of great theatre is universal human truth, not the facts of an actual life. The more we know about someone, the more difficult it becomes for a writer and actor to convince us that the person on the stage is who he claims to be.

It’s the polar opposite of the willing suspension of disbelief - the necessary engagement of belief - and it’s essential for biographical theatre to succeed.

Which is exactly what Red, John Logan’s terrific exploration of the Latvian-American artist Mark Rothko (1903–1970), does.

Red is a must-see production, and another feather in the cap for the independently funded Onward Production. The play comes to Perth within a couple of years of its London debut and only a year after it dominated the Tony Awards. I hope it attracts an audience large enough to encourage the company to bring more international work of this quality to Perth theatres.

Link here  to the complete review in The West Australian. 
For a broader look at Rothko, his legacy and the issues raised by the play, link here to William Boyd’s article in The Guardian.