Theatre: Broken Colour and The Boat Goes Over the Mountain

At the Blue Room:

Broken Colour
By Nina Pearce
Directed by Mike McCall
Designed by Iona McAuley
Lighting designed by Andrew Portwine
Sound design by The Men from Another Place
Performed by Caris Eves, Hannah Day, James Helm and Nina Pearce
Until October 5

The Boat Goes Over the Mountain
Written, directed and performed by Andrew Hale
with Dave Richardson
Designed by India Mehta
Until September 28

Caris Eves and James Helm

Mental illness is a difficult subject for the theatre, because finding a dramatic path between impenetrability and over-clarification requires delicate tightrope walking. That's why Equus, with its wretched psychoanalytical recapitulations of everything that happens in it, is among the worst of plays. No such danger here. Nina Pearce's Broken Colour, a drama of anxiety and ecstasy, is a considerable achievement.

 The Boat Goes over the Mountain is a dramatic monologue by Andrew Hale about his journey to South America with the sole intention of ingesting ayahuasca, a psychedelic concoction reputed to be a path to self- knowledge. 
Hale is a considerable theatre artist; however, the spasmodic narrative and lack of interaction with the play's location are serious shortcomings here.

Link here to the complete review of both productions in The West Australian

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).