Theatre: Pollyanna

Weeping Spoon Productions

Directed by Wyatt Nixon-Lloyd and Tim Watts

Designed by Poppy Van Oorde-Grainger and Alissa Jane Claessens

Created by the cast and crew

The Treasury 

16 - 19 February, 2012

Tim Watts and crew

I don’t normally take instructions from the producers before reviewing a show, but in the case of Pollyanna, the latest project of the Tim Watts/ Arielle Gray (Alvin Sputnik) clan, it seemed the only appropriate thing to do.

So, with their permission, I can tell you that lovely Pollyanna Smith never makes it to her sixteenth birthday party. Dead. Murdered. The police come to the door with the terrible news. Then, to the horror of all and sundry, they arrest the son of Mayor Arthur Dobson and haul him away for questioning.

I went with them, because I’m a cop too. 

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Persians

by Aeschylus, translated by Aaron Poochigian

Happy Dagger and Little y theatre companies

Directed by Andrew Hale

Performed by Christie Sistrunk, Austin Castiglione, Maitland Schnaars, Leon Osborn, Helen Angell, Lynsey Trench, Megan Moir, Ellen O’Connor and Laura Hopwood

Designed by Sarah Affleck

Lighting designed by Joe Lui

Music by Adam Burges, performed by The Men from Another Place

PICA

15 - 19 February, 2012

Aeschylus

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of The Persians, the tragedy of the rout of the navy and army of Xerxes the Great by the Greeks at Salamis. The oldest surviving play, it gives us the first insight into the consciousness of mankind as expressed by theatre. Told by an exact contemporary (Aeschylus fought at both Salamis and, some years earlier, the epochal battle of Marathon) it is also the first surviving example of drama’s unique ability to frame events and personalities. It may also be the first surviving example of propaganda.

There’s no denying, too, that as the eyes of the world turn anxiously to the most recent inheritors of Xerxes’ domain – and, ironically and for different reasons, to his Greek enemies – the chroniclers and dramatisers of ancient empires and the conduct of their affairs hold a distant mirror to us and our times.

Persians, a new translation by the American scholar and poet Aaron Poochigian, does a fine job maintaining the gravitas of Greek tragedy with just enough contemporary rhythm and idiom to allow the ancient work to work for a modern audience.

Link here  to the complete review in The West Australian 

Theatre: …miskien

Written by Tara Louise Notcutt, Albert Pretorius and Gideon Lombard

Directed by Tara Louise Notcutt

Performed by Albert Pretorius and Gideon Lombard

PICA

15 - 19 February 19

Gideon Lombard

A little way into this powerful drama of dead-end lives and male bonding in modern South Africa, I realised that I had never heard Afrikaans spoken in conversation. There is much about ordinary lives in that great country, our neighbour but for 8000 kms of ocean, that are hidden from us by the enormous events that have swirled around it.

We know Mandela, but do we know Layton (Gideon Lombard) and Cormac (Albert Pretorius) the two Capetown 25-year-old office workers whose workaday world and relationship is the story of the play? As it turns out, we know them very well, because they are our lives as well.

Hilarious and awfully sad, …miskien is one of the highlights of the Fringe.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Virgie

Written and performed by Renee Newman-Storen

Directed by Mark Storen and Emily Mclean

Blue Room Theatre

Until February 10

Renee Newman-Storen had little to go on when she brought Virgie Vivienne to the stage; an uncertain birth date sometime in the 1870’s, scraps of reviews and stories (including one in this newspaper’s edition of 24 September, 1898), an interview, decades later, with an old lady who remembers, when she was a girl, being taught drama by her in Adelaide. Virgie dies, destitute, in that city in 1940.

From these bits and pieces Newman-Storen imagines a courageous, resilient and ingenious woman and the tough lives she and those she came across lived. 


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian.