Theatre: Not Me… (★★★)

Gap II
Devised and directed by Hermione Gehle
Set design by Jamie Davies
Music by Tim Newhouse
Lighting and sound by Desne Smallberger
Devised and performed by Ashana Murphy, Adam Droppert, Angela Mahlatjie, Emma Harvey, Jordan Holloway, Justin Gray, Nicholas Allen, Quaid Kirshner, and Danen Englenberg
Subiaco Arts Centre Studio
March 26-28, then in schools

Theatre-in-education is a tricky business. You’re either putting established work in front of an understandably wary audience, or the lives of school-aged students on stage for people that know those lives – their own lives – much better than you do.
Not Me… is an example of the latter, and, happily, it makes a more than decent fist of it.
The story of a cohort of high school kids, mostly years 11 and 12, a couple a year or two younger, whose lives and relationships are dominated, then upturned, by social media, has been fashioned by the director Hermione Gehle and a cast of nine students at The Actor’s Hub’s Gap II course into a tightly-realised cautionary tale that I’m confident will pass the cringe test of high school audiences.

Theatre: Dinner (★★½)

Black Swan State Theatre Company
Written by Moira Buffini
Directed by Kate Cherry
Set and lighting designed by Trent Suidgeest
Sound designer and composer Ash Gibson Greig
With Rebecca Davis, Stuart Halusz, Greg McNeill, Kenneth Ransom, Steve Turner, Alison van Reeken and Tasma Walton
Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
Until 29 March 

There’s a line in Moira Buffini’s 2002 play, Dinner, when a woman, overhearing an ex-soldier’s stories of his violent exploits in Liberia, exclaims “You killed a LIBRARIAN??”. Boom-Tish!
Make of that gag what you will, but we can assume those involved in Dinner aren’t approaching the undertaking too seriously. Or at least they shouldn’t be.
Dinner is professionally prepared and well served. It’s just hard to fathom why anyone bothered to reheat it.


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian
  

Theatre: From the Rubble (★★★½)

Perth Theatre Company
Conceived and directed by Melissa Cantwell
From stories by Sophie McNeill
Visual design by Fleur Elise Noble
Composed by Joe Lui and Mei Saraswati
Sound design by Joe Lui
Audiovisual technician Mia Holton
Performed by Mei Saraswati, Tina Torabi and Mikala Westall
PICA 16 – 28 March  

Mei Saraswati

The work of the remarkable young WA journalist Sophie McNeill has taken her deep into the world’s rubble. The stories she has brought back from it are largely of the dead and wounded, the innocent and unarmed, mothers and their children, the old and defenceless.
Inspired by McNeill and her stories from Afghanistan, Perth Theatre Company’s Melissa Cantwell has devised an artistically ambitious and generally impressive production that is as much about the universal as any particular.
From the Rubble is tough, uncompromising work (don’t look for even the darkest of black humour here) and will not be for everyone’s taste or stomach. It is, however, the bearer of some grim truths, and, for that alone, it merits your attention.        
Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Black Diggers (★★★★½)

Queensland Theatre Company
Written by Tom Wright
Directed by Wesley Enoch
Designed by Stephen Curtis
Cast: George Bostock, Luke Carroll, Shaka Cook, Trevor Jamieson, Kirk Page, Guy Simon, Colin Smith, Eliah Watego and Tibian Wyles
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until 7 March



Late in Tom Wright’s Black Diggers, a returned WWI serviceman begins bleeding under the arm, and a piece of shrapnel, buried in his body for decades – a “bit of left-over war” – comes to the surface.
It’s an apt metaphor for the work done by this magnificent piece of storytelling.
Something like 800 indigenous Australian men sidestepped regulations that barred them – as non-European non-citizens – from enlisting in the 1st AIF. They fought at Gallipoli, in Palestine and on the Western Front, and gained respect and comradeship in the trenches, where mud and blood covers all colours of skin, and killing and dying come alike to all races.
For many, though, their homecoming was appalling, their service largely ignored by a country unprepared to afford them the dignity and opportunities of being an Australian, let alone one of its returning heroes.

Theatre: Ubu and the Truth Commission (★★★)

Handspring Puppet Company
Conceived and directed by William Kentridge
Written by Jane Taylor
Puppets and sets designed by Adrian Kohler
Cast: Dawid Minnaar and Busi Zokufa
Puppeteers: Gabriel Marchand, Mandiseli Maseti and Mongi Mthombeni
Heath Ledger Theatre
24 – 28 February

Ubu and the Truth Commission was an important marker in both South Africa’s theatre and its wider history.
It was a cry of outrage at the ease with which many of the perpetrators of the worst crimes of Apartheid were allowed to use edited versions of the truth and smooth, practiced contrition to sidestep the consequences of their vile activities.
It reminded us that generals fight from behind; that, more often than not, the hand that signs the paper escapes the manacles that ultimately shackle those of the instruments of its policies. 
The difficulty in approaching Ubu now, almost two decades later, is that its historical context theatrically, Alfred Jarry’s nineteenth century proto-absurdist Ubu plays, honed by their surrealist and Brechtian successors, now blurs its actual historical context, making it hard to know exactly what we are watching, and to what purpose.

Theatre: The Paper Architect ★★★★

Created by Davy and Kristin McGuire
Performed by John Cording
CIA Studios
Until March 7

Two of PIAF’s biggest hits tell of a man and a girl searching for each other. One attracted a huge audience, the other sold out instantly after a frenzied demand for tickets.
The main difference between The Giants and The Paper Architect is the little matter of their characters’ scale – 11m tall on the one hand, 8cm on the other.
And, like Circa’s Paul O’Keeffe, spinning a cigarette paper propeller on his finger last week, The Paper Architect shows that the very best things in a festival can come in its tiniest packages.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian.   

Theatre: I Wish I Was Lonely (★★★)

Written and performed by Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe
STC Rehearsal Room
Until February 28

Whether you’re amazed by the sea of pedestrians glued to their tiny screens as they walk down a street in Hong Kong, or find yourself fuming at an intersection in Perth as the person in the car ahead of you texts away, oblivious to the green light they’re wasting, there’s no escaping the mobile phone.
It’s hard to believe that they took hold only twenty years or so ago, and that smart phones have been with us for less than a decade, such is their impact on our lives.
In their I Wish I Was Lonely, the British writers and performers Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe ask us to contemplate that impact, and the way our human interactions have been channeled and changed by them.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian