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

Theatre: Tender Napalm

Perth Theatre Company

Written by Philip Ridley

Directed by Melissa Cantwell

Featuring Joshua Brennan and Anna Houston

The prodigious British playwright, novelist and artist Philip Ridley divides his output fairly equally between works for children and adults. Ridley’s ability to explore the imaginary worlds of young people, their cruelties, courage and capacity for love is a vital strength of Perth Theatre Company’s Australian premiere production of Tender Napalm.

While this is most decidedly a play for adults (all the usual warnings apply), it has the bravery of youth. Its two, un-named, characters (Joshua Brennan and Ann Houston) inhabit a non-specific place and time and more often than not speak in parables and fantasies. Somehow, through stories of tsunamis and armies of monkeys, we get glimpses of something terrible that has happened to these people that has unhinged them and their relationship.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian