Physical theatre: WALK

by Bobby Russell

Designed by Opie Robinson

Lighting design by Joe Lui

Sound design by Peter McAvan

Performed by Bobby Russell

Blue Room Theatre

July 14 - 30, 2022

pic: Jed Lyall

 For all its many virtues, the little black box theatre at the Blue Room is not an ideal venue for the spectacular. It’s been achieved before (Humphrey Bower and Tim Green’s Golem in 2020 and Leah Shelton’s Bitch On Heat the year before come to mind) but rarely.

Now along comes Bobby Russell’s WALK, and it absolutely blows conventional wisdom about what can and can’t be done there to smithereens. Russell and their collaborators have created a dark, sumptuous environment of light, sound, vapours and forms that challenge and extend the senses.

While Russell is the only live performer, writhing through a maze of marvelous creations by Opie Robinson, dark fogs and blinding bursts of light, there’s a case that their performance is as much an physical adjunct to a remarkable original composition by Peter McAvan than that McAvan’s music is an accompaniment to Russell’s dance.

Add to that a remarkable lighting design by Joe Lui that, among many striking effects, uses bursts of dazzling light that allow Russell to reset while our pupils recover from the shock.

The cumulative effect of movement, music and light produces a work with a very clear structure within which Russell tells their story.

But what is it, what are these creatures that Russell and Robinson creates, and what narrative purpose do they serve?

A confession: dance is a foreign language to me. I appreciate its skill and beauty in the same way I admire French, or Noongar, or Hindi, but find interpreting what is being said to me as difficult as understanding what I’m being told in those languages.

Having said that, I’m sure Russell is telling their own story, and their metaphor is the process of metamorphosis. Their inner being, their soul, is represented by their unadorned form, close-shaven, non-binary, monochromatic, anonymous – the egg from which they will grow.

The egg’s metamorphosis, to larvae, pupa and adult is represented by its interaction with Opie’s creatures – a gigantic, billowing form, like a mutant caterpillar, and a disintegrating suit of armour, glowing like some burning conquistador – until, finally, the egg becomes adult and finds its personality in drag in shimmering gold lamé and electric wig, beaming as they lip-sync to Kylie and take their bow.

Russell’s story is about the struggle for identity and for freedom in the face of a society that would contain them or swallow them whole. Shot through the spectacle is powerful emotion and an authentic humanity.

Theatre/Dance: Salome δ

Squid Vicious
Devised and performed by Olivia Hendry and Andrew Sutherland
Directed by Joe Lui (with creative producer Briannah Davis)
Designed by Declan Macphail
Sound and light design by Joe Lui

I’ve seen two versions of, or at least in a trajectory around, Oscar Wilde’s Salome. The first (showing my age again) was Lindsay Kemp’s hallucinogenic, slow-motion marvel at the London Roundhouse in 1977 that made it, and him, icons of their age.
The second, far more prolix and topical than Kemp’s, is a Summer Nights production at the Blue Room. (Those of you who’ve been feeling there’s something missing from this year’s Fringe World, that’s what it is.)
The dancer Olivia Hendry and the polyalternatist Andrew Sutherland have wrapped themselves in Joe Lui’s dense son et lumiere, Declan Macphail’s Siamese twin-set of an Aubrey Beardsley gown, and Lui and Briannah Davis’s minutely reactive direction. Then, layer by layer of exquisite, excruciating pain, they dance their seven veils for us.
There’s a consumptive nostalgia for illness embroidered into those veils, transformed into an aesthetic beauty, like Rosetti’s Beata Beatrix.
And they are beautiful; Hendry, pale, with breasts exposed like Beardsley’s Salome, Sutherland reptilian, microphone and stand raised aloft like photographs of a Jim Morrison.
Sutherland is declamatory, much in the way of Allen Ginsberg, and he takes us on a nightmare journey through the underworlds of the diseases of our time, HIV/AIDS, anorexia and, now, COVID; Hendry is silent, orbiting, covering and uncovering in the material that binds them both, unravelling away and spinning back to him.
It’s an intensely personal double-act, the dancer and the poet, drawn from experience, repetitive and insistent.
Finally, quite unexpectedly, when all the veils have been removed, Sutherland becoming a dancer, Hendry an orator, in a pas de deux of joys and sorrows.
It reminds you – this is a show that incubates memory – of Leonard Cohen’s “And when we fell together/ All our flesh was like a veil”.
There are no veils of secrecy in this Salome, though it is complex, both in its messages and its tempo, and might be impenetrable if you hit its atmosphere at the wrong angle.
But, like a dance, or a poem, or a deathbed, it has an honesty that can only arise in places where there’s nothing else left to lose.

(You'll enjoy Nina Levy's insightful review in Seesaw Magazine here)

Salome δ is at the Blue Room until Feb 5.

Theatre: Medusa

Renegade Productions and Bow and Dagger

Written by Finn O’Branagáin

Directed and sound design by Joe Lui

Set and costume design by Ish Marrington

Lighting design by Kristie Smith

AV design by Clare Testoni

Performed by Moana Lutton, Jacinta Larcombe, Jess Moyle, Mani Mae Gomes, Michelle Aitken, Andrew Sutherland and Sandy McKendrick

Blue Room Theatre

Until 3 November

The greatest compliment you can pay Medusa – or, certainly, the one its writer Finn O’Branagáin and director Joe Lui would most appreciate, I suspect – is that it is “splitting people”.

That’s at least what a friend texted me as I donned running shoes and easy-to-wash clothes for 75 minutes of self-proclaimed uncomfortable (you get to stand through the performance), loud and messy theatre.

My friend meant that people were either loving or hating it – I’m firmly in the latter camp – but, perhaps unconsciously, she expressed a deeper truth about the show; it splits you.

Its physical discomfort is paralleled by a psychic one; the action, a raging female blood-haka, is a sensory assault; Lui’s choreography and Clare Testoni’s audio visual work, while tight as a drum, are disconcertingly out of synch; the actors, semi-naked, daubed in paint and blood, are pungent and self-aware, the noise, woman-made or recorded, is percussive and intrusive.

Medusa is quite deliberately, a sensory overload.

O’Branagáin, Lui and Testoni are all fascinated by mythology, and their body of work is shot through with it. Medusa, the snake-haired Gorgon monster of Greek mythology whose gaze turned men to stone is an almost inevitable metaphor of female oppression and rage for them.

She represents the quintessence of woman-as-monstrous and woman-as-deadly, the touchstone of misogyny and revulsion, the physical and psychological anathema to the orderly patriarchal world view.

Of rape, and murder.

(There were times when I couldn’t help thinking of Tony Abbott and Bronwyn Bishop preening in front of the “Ditch the Bitch” caricature of Julia Gillard – it’s a wonder they didn’t put snakes in her hair.)

The ensemble of young women (Moana Lutton, Jacinta Larcombe, Jess Moyle, Mani Mae Gomes and Michelle Aitken), one androgynous man (Andrew Sutherland), and an older, homeless woman (Sandy McKendrick) beat on drums, floors and punching bags, chant, rage about the stage while Testoni’s images charge around them.

It’s a remorseless and exciting barrage, often seemingly formless and without narrative, but its messages get into your head like drumbeats.

Especially effective is the interplay between McKendrick’s monologues, filmed live from an adjoining room (you can wander over to watch her “live”) by Sutherland and projected scratchily and unstable on the walls of Ish Marrington’s scribbled set.

When McKendrick enters the main room, perched on a gopher like a dilapidated queen, wounded by life and defiant to the end, while the names of victims of the Medusa-myth flash up around her, the purpose of this ramshackle, rumbustious, divisive piece is delivered, whole and unmistakable.    

Theatre: Tamagotchi Reset & Other Doomsdays (★★★½)

Written by Finn O’Branagain and Scott Sandwich
Directed by Joe Lui
Designed by Sara Chirichilli
Performed by Paul Grabovac and Izzy McDonald
Blue Room Theatre
Until July 8

Programmes are useful things, but they can give the game away.
So, for example, if I’d read mine before watching Finn O’Branagain and Scott Sandwich’s Tamagotchi Reset & Other Doomsdays I would have realized much earlier than I did that the characters being played by the actors Paul Grabovac and Izzy McDonald were the playwrights themselves.
It would quite likely also have dawned on me that the play it appeared we were watching wasn’t a play at all, rather, in the writers’ own words, a “Secretly-Educational Devised Performance Lecture”, and that the play, the actual play, was about their relationship, their artistic conflicts and divergent concerns, and the process (including their interactions with the dramaturg and director Joe Lui) by which their work arrived on the stage.

Theatre: [PORTO] (★★★★)

Joe Lui and Alicia Osyka

by Kate Benson
Directed by Lisa Louttit
Designed by Sara Chirichilli
Lighting designer Karen Cook
Sound designer Joe Lui
Performed by Joe Lui, Alicia Osyka, James Marzec, Taryn Ryan, Nick Pages-Oliver and Tristan McInnes
Blue Room Theatre
Until November 5

Porto (Alicia Osyka) spends this evening, as she does most others, in the local Brooklyn bar where she is routinely fed, watered, teased and propped up by the bartender, Doug (James Marzec) and the waiter Raphael (Nick Pages-Oliver). Another regular, Dry Sac (Taryn Ryan), “the hottest woman you’ve ever laid eyes on”, slinks in wearing a dress made of what seems to be paint. (There are very specific character descriptions and stage directions in the American playwright Kate Benson’s text – more on that shortly.)
There’s the usual banter between people who know – though perhaps not well, and are comfortable with, one another. There’s food talk, booze talk, the faintly conspiratorial tone of American bars since prohibition; if the cops burst in, blackjack tables and drinks would disappear and Dry Sac would flutter her eyelashes as though butter wouldn’t melt – although, in her case, at least, it would sizzle.  
Into this cosy mix comes Hennepin (Tristan McInnes), “some version of a Hot Guy”, with a copy of the extravagantly-mourned David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest under his arm.  He stirs the joint, and especially Porto, up a bit. Some things happen, but nothing much more than you’d expect over the course of a boozy few days in and around a bar. Certainly, there’s nothing justifies a plot summary, or a spoiler alert, from me.
This narrative inconsequentiality means Benson can throw everything she’s got at the characters and their milieu, which she does with great erudition and bravado. [PORTO] gallops along, casting theatrical daring and cultural references from its hooves like broken turf.

Theatre: Selkie (★★★½)

by Finn O’Branagain
Directed by Joe Lui
Choreography by Laura Boynes
Designed by Cherish Marrington
Sound and lighting designed by Joe Lui
Featuring Paul Grabovac, Ella Hetherington, Kynan Hughes and Yilin Kong
The Blue Room
Until April 30

Yilin Kong (pic Cameron Etchells)

The legend of the selkie, seal-like creatures who shed their skins to live on dry land among humans, is part of the folklore of the islands and coasts of the remote North Atlantic.
It’s easy to see why the playwright Finn O’Branagáin, whose interest in legend and myth was manifest in last year’s The Epic, would be drawn to the selkie, and its no surprise that Joe Lui should leap at the chance to direct the result.
They are a formidable team, and Selkie is a provocative and disquieting work.The story might have both more complexity and clarity (at 45 minutes, it has the time to deliver both), and, for all its quality, the design could use more depth and intricacy.
Even as it stands, though, Selkie is a noteworthy start to a Blue Room season of increasing importance to Perth theatre.

Read the complete review in The West Australian 

Fracture (★★★) and How We Ruined MacArthur's Markers (★½)

Two debutante teams of producers are strutting their stuff in short seasons on Perth stages this week. 

Fracture 
by Lucy Clements
Directed by Joe Lui
Designed by Patrick Howe
Featuring Salacia Briggs, Paul Grabovac, James Marzec and Mikala Westall
Blue Room Theatre
Until June 27


Lucy Clements and Harriet Roberts are stepping out from their final year at WAAPA with Clement’s psychological drama Fractured. They’ve done their due diligence and delivered a tight, crafty script in a perfect venue, realised by the established talent they’ve engaged, including the director Joe Lui and designer Patrick Howe.
The script has some infelicities, and could do with some more effective relief from the pervasive gloom, but Fracture is a strong beginning for Clements and Roberts.

How We Ruined MacArthur’s Markers
By Thomas Owen and Cal Silberstein
Music by Jackson Griggs
Directed by Thomas Owen
Performed by Ben Thomas, James Cohen, Amy Fortnum, Olivia Everett, Sven Ironside and Madeline Crofts
Subiaco Arts Centre
Until June 27
 
While Fracture looks forward to its creators’ future, Thomas Owen, Cal Silberstein and Jackson Griggs’ How We Ruined MacArthur’s Markers looks back to their days in UWA’s University Dramatic Society, where a version of it was produced last year. 
Some of the young cast do well (Madeline Croft’s dipsomaniac company lawyer and Sven Ironside’s love struck accountant had good nights), but MacArthur’s Markers gave us little indication of the potential of either its creators or performers.


Go to both reviews 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: A Circle of Buzzards (★★★)

Written by Nathaniel Moncrieff
Directed by Joe Lui
Performed by Austin Castiglione, Jeremy Mitchell and Ella Hetherington
PICA
Until 21 Feb

In Steve Earle’s song, A Gringo’s Tale, two American men strike up a conversation at a bar in an out-of-the-way Mexican town. One is a tourist; the other is a fugitive, hiding from some shadowy CIA operatives.
Substitute Australians for Americans, Spain for Mexico and an Australian mining company called The Saetón Group for the CIA and you’ve got the set-up for Nathaniel Moncrieff’s tidy little thriller, A Circle of Buzzards.
What Earle neglected, and Moncrieff has made the engine of his narrative, is the identity of the tourist, and his reasons for being in the bar plying his companion with drinks.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Welcome to Slaughter

11.47 Productions
Devised and performed by Michelle Robin Anderson, Jo Morris and Emily Rose Brennan
Devised and text by Jeffrey Jay Fowler
Directed by Michelle Robin Anderson and Joe Lui
Set design Shaye Preston
Lighting design Joe Lui
Sound design Brett Smith
Blue Room Theatre
Until 25 October
 
Welcome to Slaughter is a rom-horredy.
It’s certainly not a rom-com (no happiness ever after to be had here), but it’s not slasher, snuff or any of the other forms of horror either.
You could say it’s “a treatment of the disintegration of a romantic relationship by means of the allegorical personification of destructive thoughts, with strong elements of horror and comedy”, but that’s a bit old school, and too long to fit on a poster. So rom-horredy it is. 

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Letters Home and What Do They Call Me

Letters Home 
Written and performed by Joe Lui
Direction mentor Humphrey Bower
Until October 4

What Do They Call Me
By Eva Johnson
Directed by Eva Grace Mullaley
Performed by Ebony McGuire, Amy Smith and Alyssa Thompson
The Blue Room
Until September 27
 

The brave, skilled and endlessly industrious Joe Lui has been writer, composer, producer, director, sound and lighting designer and/or musician for very many of our most adventurous and confronting productions. He’s also something of an enigma.
Born Lui Shang Yu into a conservative Singaporean Chinese family, Lui is bitterly estranged from his parents and exiled from Singapore because he refused to do national service. In his one-man show, Letters Home, the story he tells is his own.
A voracious consumer of culture, from high art to American Football, Lui is, in many ways, an invention of himself—in one brilliant moment he speaks with the Singlish pronunciation of the young man who arrived in Perth to study years ago; the effect is as revealing as it is startling.
Lui has plenty to think about, and plenty to say. Letters Home is a torrent of words—part self-analysis, part confession, part didacticism—about Chinese culture, families, sex and death.
What emerges is a self-portrait of a man who holds very firm ideas but is still discovering how he came by them.
We learn about his heroes, his philosophy of art and sex, Chinese food and rituals. We also learn that he’s stubborn, pugnacious and believes in work rather than inspiration.
What he learns in Letters Home, though, is that you can reject things—family, country and way of life—without having to hate them.
Letters Home is visually rich (much credit to Cherish Marrington’s set design, Chris Donnelly’s lighting and Mia Holton’s video design) and much more tightly staged than it appears (Humphrey Bower collaborated with Lui on its direction).
I can’t imagine any of the hundreds of people who’ve been amazed and intrigued by Joe Lui over the years will want to miss it; for those who haven’t, you should take the opportunity to meet a quite remarkable person. 
  
What Do They Call Me, Eva Johnson’s seminal 1990 play about the lives of the three women of an Aboriginal family, was originally conceived as a one-woman show. This revival has a different actor for each of the characters; the brave, combative Connie (Amy Smith) and her daughters, the “assimilated” Regina (Alyssa Thompson) and activist Alison (Ebony McGuire).
Smith, Thompson and McGuire are all fine, and the director Eva Grace Munelly manages the narration and the transitions between her actors well, but inevitably each performance is one-dimensional, a quick sketch. The challenge for a single actor of moving between the characters would have made for more compelling theatre.
That aside, it’s important that we see revivals of work from the back catalogue of Aboriginal theatre. Plays like What Do They Call Me, by reminding us of where indigenous people have been, make us realise how far we all still have to go.


This review appeared in The West Australian 20.9.14

Theatre: Confessions of a Pyromaniac

By Matthew Cooper
Imprint Productions in association with Yirra Yaakin
directed by Shakara Walley
designed by Patrick Howe
Music and lighting by Joe Lui
performed by Mathew Cooper, Calen Tassone, Katya Shevtsov and Stephanie Somerville
Blue Room Theatre
10 - 19 July, 2014
 
While Matthew Cooper’s Confessions of a Pyromaniac (directed by Shakara Walley at the Blue Room Theatre) isn’t in the first rank of Aboriginal theatre, it is undeniably and impressively liberating.
That’s because while three of its characters, and the actors playing them, are Aboriginal, their ethnicity is a subtext, rather than the defining factor in either their personalities or the play’s action.
There’s a continuing conversation about the opportunities for Aboriginal actors to play other than Aborigines; here Cooper inverts the argument by presenting characters who conform to none of the stereotypes, positive or negative, we’ve come to expect in the representation of Indigenous people on stage.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Giving Up the Ghosts and 3 Seeds

Giving Up the Ghosts 
By Sarah Young
Owl Productions
Directed by Joe Lui
Designer Sara Chirichilli
Performed by Georgia King and Paul Grabovac

3 Seeds
By Afeif Ismail
Transcreated by Vivienne Glance and Afeif Ismail
Always Working Artists
Directed by Jeremy Rice
Designed by Cherie Hewson
Performed by Violette Ayad, Michelle Endersbee, Paul Grabovac, Janice Lim, Verity Softly, Kevin Mararo Wangai, Brianna Williams

For most of us, suicide is inexplicable. Perhaps, for our own safety, it needs to be. The great strength of Giving Up the Ghosts, the playwriting debut of Sarah Young, is that she doesn’t try to explain the suicidal impulse, or impose insights upon it. Her play, as deceptively powerful as it is deceptively simple, builds a platform for us to attempt to grasp a meaning, or at least some understanding, from suicide’s opaque horror.

Theatre: The Tribe

Written and directed by Joe Lui
Designed by India Caitlin Mehta
Performed by Ella Hetherington, Paul Grabovac and Mikala Westall
The Blue Room Theatre
Until November 2

I play a little game with the writer, director, musician and lighting and sound designer Joe Lui. It comprises using more and more extravagant superlatives to describe the polymathematical Lui (whoops! I’ve done it again) who sometimes seems the mortar without which the entire edifice of alternative theatre in Perth would collapse.
It’s hard, though, to imagine an adjective that would do Lui’s epic, The Tribe, justice. “Ambitious” hardly suffices to describe a play that re-jigs Paradise Lost before interval, before moving on to six million years of evolutionary theory after drinks.

Theatre: Robots Vs. Art

By Travis Cotton

Directed by Phil Moilin

Performed by Damon Lockwood, Sean Walsh, Renee Newman Storen and Ben Mortley

The Blue Room

Until June 1

The pivot of Travis Cotton’s futurist fable of a world run by robots comes when Giles (Damon Lockwood), a former playwright and director now a slave worker in the conqueror’s zinc mines, has to decide whether to stage a play for his psychopathic overlord Master Bot (Sean Walsh) or be chain-whipped to death. Chances are, given his hideous lifestyle and complete absence of hope, he’d choose the latter, but for one complication: he’s the last living human.

Giles ultimately has a victory of sorts, but it’s a pyrrhic one. Mankind has forfeited its rights and betrayed its stewardship of the Earth, and the robots have no interest in being like him.

Robots will never rule the world, but the message of Cotton’s provocative play is that things very like them have tried, and will try again, to do so. 

Link here to the complete version of this review in The West Australian       

Theatre: The Book of Death

Renegade Productions

Written by Joe Lui and the cast

Directed by Joe Lui

Designed by Sara Chirichilli

Featuring Paul Grabovac, Ella Hetherington and Moana Lutton

Blue Room Theatre

7 – 25 August, 2011

Paul Grabovac, Ella Hetherington and Moanna Lutton

Life as a theatre professional in this town is tough. You’ve got to be adaptable to survive.

The best survivor I know is Joe Lui, the creator, co-writer and composer, director and lighting designer of the The Book of Death at the Blue Room. Even more impressive than his skills and work ethic is that he is always prepared to challenge and confront, often quite brutally.

He’s also a natural collaborator, and he’s gathered some fine and brave artists for this show. Together, they’ve produced a work that, while often uncomfortable and elusive, is constantly thought provoking and committed.

Theatre: The Magic Hour

Deckchair Theatre

Written by Vanessa Bates

Directed by Chris Bendall

Set and costume design by Alicia Clements

Light and sound designed by Joe Lui

Performed by Ursula Yovich

Ursula Yovich (pic: Jon Green)

Ursula Yovich is an experienced and garlanded performer yet, in The Magic Hour, she continues to challenge herself and her craft.

These retellings of iconic fairy stories take her away from her signature motifs, her singing and her Aboriginal heritage, but playwright Vanessa Bates and director Chris Bendall have created a character in the storyteller who, while ethnically non-specific, plays beautifully to Yovich’s strengths. Clearly relishing the chance to fly out of her comfort zone, she delivers a potent, nuanced performance that had the Deckchair Theatre audience on its feet at the curtain.

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: A Germ of an Idea, Laryngectomy

A Germ of an Idea

Written and performed by Monica Main

Directed by Helen Doig with Fran Tinley

Blue Room Theatre

7 – 25 June, 2011

Laryngectomy

Renegade Productions

Written by Demelza Rogers and Joe Lui

Directed by Joe Lui

Featuring Paul Grabovac, Jessica Rawnsley, Demelza Rogers and Jessica Allen Jones

Blue Room Theatre

7 – 18 June, 2011

When I arrived at the Blue Room to see two shows I was warned were “like chalk and cheese”, there were two people stuck in the lift between floors (who even knew the Blue Room had a lift). Had to be an omen.

The cheesy part was A Germ of an Idea, Monica Main’s take on all things dirty, grimy and malodorous, a nice idea that only comes off in parts.

Laryngectomy proved, quite literally, to be the chalky bit of the evening, but presented with such skill, ferocity and courage that you had to take stock and take notice.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian