Friday, March 16, 2012

Theatre: Blackbird

Perth Theatre Company
Written by David Harrower
Directed by Melissa Cantwell
Featuring Humphrey Bower and Anna Houston
STC Studio until March 24

Put two people in a room, turn on the heat and stir. It’s an exciting, but hazardous, recipe for theatre; when there are so few ingredients they have to be painstakingly matched and carefully prepared, or things can go badly wrong.
On a whim, maybe a hunch, I read David Harrower’s play a couple of days before seeing Melissa Cantwell’s production at the STC Studio. What I found was a long dramatic poem, often powerfully reminiscent of Philip Larkin and, especially, T.S. Eliot. Dialogue is broken into shards of thought, repeated and sharpened like a pencil to breaking point, heightened, nerve-stretched, and reductive in the best possible way. It’s a brilliant script on the page. It also seemed to me a daunting piece to convincingly bring to the stage.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

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