Theatre: Playhouse Creatures

By April de Angelis

Her Infinite Variety Ensemble

Directed by Helen Doig

Performed by Tiffany Barton, Rhoda Lopez, Angelique Malcolm, Claire Munday and Summer Williams

The Guild Studio

Until June 8

Tiffany Barton, Angelique Malcolm
and Summer Williams

The British playwright April de Angelis’s Playhouse Creatures is the best kind of historical drama. Firmly based on, but not bound by, real events and characters, it illuminates an era without either lecturing or tutoring.

It's a perfect choice for the all-female Her Infinite Variety Ensemble (HIVE), whose charter is to create opportunities for women in theatre. Beyond its obvious advantages – five strong roles for actresses – it deals with the most elemental opportunity for women in the theatre; the right to be in it at all, which, on the English stage at least, only came a few years before, in 1660. 
To their credit, they’ve had the initiative to turn a disused room in the old Equity Guild building in Claisebrook into a pop-up theatre. It’s fairly rough and ready, and only seats forty, but this instructive and richly entertaining production deserves to fill them. 

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian         

Theatre: The Cat in the Box

by Vivienne Glance

directed by Mark Barford

With James Helm, Summer Williams, Anna Brockway and Kingsley Judd

Blue Room Theatre

31 July – 18 August

James Helm and Summer Williams

Vivienne Glance’s little absurdist thriller The Cat in the Box has its roots very squarely in the 1970s, but that doesn’t make it less entertaining or provocative.

The set-up is familiar territory – four very different people find themselves locked in a room with no way of escape and precious little to survive on. How they survive, and how the political microcosm in the room forms and plays out, is the stuff of the play.

There’s nothing particularly innovative or radical about Glance’s ideas – we’ve seen them before, but they are refreshed by the quality of her writing, which is sharp, funny and rarely portentous.

There’s nothing in The Cat in the Box to change the world, but as an entertainment, and a theatrical undertaking, it has much to recommend it.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Noises Off

By Michael Frayn

Knuts Theatre

Directed by Stephen Lee

With Ian Bolgia, Melissa Kiiveri, Angelique Malcolm, David Meadows, Graham Mitchell, Claire Munday, Adam T Perkins, Shirley Van Sanden and Summer Williams

Camelot Theatre, Mosman Park

1 – 12 May 2012

Shirley Van Sanden and Melissa Kiiveri

Michael Frayn’s celebrated Noises Off is, in many respects, a victim of its own fame. Thirty years on, it’s a hit whenever it gets a worthy production (a much-admired revival is currently running on the West End), but it has often suffered at the hands of directors and casts attracted by its veneer of broad humour – and deliberately cheap and nasty production values – but unable to manage its technical intricacies and subtleties.

I went to the Camelot Theatre in Mosman Park for the debut production the Knuts Theatre Company with some trepidation. Happily, though, this Noises Off was confidently handled and genuinely funny.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian