Theatre: Storm Boy (★★★★½)

By Tom Holloway
from the novel by Colin Thiele
Barking Gecko and Sydney Theatre Company
Directed by John Sheedy
Designed by Michael Scott-Mitchell
Lighting design by Damien Cooper
Sound design by Kingsley Reeve
Puppetry directed by Peter Wilson
Performed by Otis Pavlovic (alternating with Kai Lewins), Jimi Bani, Julian Garner, Anthony Mayor and Phil Dean Walford
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until July 11

Barking Gecko and the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Colin Thiele’s Storm Boy, the much-loved children’s story that has been sensitively and economically adapted for the stage by Tom Holliday, makes a short but welcome return to the Heath Ledger Theatre for the first week of the school holidays.
It features an entirely new cast from the original 2013 production, but its strengths and virtues are entirely intact.
This production is a final encore for Barking Gecko’s former artistic director John Sheedy. There’s no doubt about the legacy of creativity and ambition he’s left to our exceptional theatre company for young people.

I reviewed Storm Boy in its first Perth season in 2013, and this review of its return season inevitably contains some self-plagiarism! Link here for the complete version of this review, and here for the original 2013 review, both in The West Australian. 

Theatre: The Shadow King

William Shakespeare's King Lear 
adapted by Michael Kantor and Tom E Lewis
Malthouse Theatre
Directed by Michael Kantor
Designed by Paul Jackson, Michael Kantor and David Miller
Musical direction John Rodgers
Performed by Jada Alberts, Jimi Bani, Frances Djulibing, Rarriwuy Hick, Damion Hunter, Kamahi Djordon King, Tom E. Lewis and Natasha Wanganeen, with musicians Selwyn Burns, Djakapurra Munyarryun and Bart Willoughby
Heath Ledger Theatre until 1 March
 
Let’s be clear: despite its title, its language and its setting, The Shadow King is King Lear, Shakespeare’s, and all theatre’s, supreme drama.
In a remarkable achievement, Michael Kantor and Tom E. Lewis (who also plays the king) have stripped half its length, all but eight of its 21 characters (no sadistic Cornwall, no grasping Albany, no loyal Kent), changed the gender of one of them (Gloucester), presented a radically altered text in five indigenous languages as well as English, and delivered an always satisfying and sometimes transcendent version of the play.
As Djakapurra Munyarryun’s phenomenal, keening voice sings all the sorrow of tens of thousands of years, signed, date stamped and filed; as Frances Djulibing falls to the ground from the cliff her son imagines for her; as Tom E. Lewis dances, distracted, in the dust, the unsurpassable art that lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s greatest play, and this memorable, iconic, imagining of it, rises up from the red dirt and takes us in.


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian