Theatre: Latitudes (★★)

By Mark Walsh
Directed by Mikala Westall
Designed by Patrick Howe
Sound design Will Slade
Lighting design Chris Donnelly
Performed by Tessa Carmody, Jo Morris and Claire Munday
Until February 21


I have an aversion to plays – Peter Shaffer’s Equus comes quickly to mind – that insist on explaining themselves to you. No such accusation can be levelled at Mark Walsh’s Latitudes (at the Blue Room, directed by Mikala Westall).
It’s an opaque, convoluted affair that, despite strong performances and an impressive creative team, defied my best efforts to untangle.


Read the complete review 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: Moving On Inc. (★ ★ ★ ★)

Written and directed by Mikala Westall
Lighting and sound designer Joe Lui
Performed by Nicola Bartlett, Harriet Gordon-Anderson and Barnaby Pollock
Until February 21

The actor Mikala Westall impressed in her recent performances in Will O’Mahoney’s Great White and Joe Lui’s The Tribe. Now she has a play of her own, Moving On Inc., and has come up trumps first time.
Westall’s jumping off point is the little known profession of cleaning up the effects of the deceased. What interested her in particular is the idea of tidying up all those memories, allowing everything that people were to move on into their eternity.
Abby (Harriet Gordon-Anderson) and her boyfriend Sam (Barnaby Pollock) are taking her late dad’s effects into the bush to burn them. There’s something – or someone – on the road, and Sam can’t get the car started again after he swerves to avoid a collision.
An older woman, Ruth (Nicola Bartlett) appears, and seems to be more interested in what the couple are planning, and know more about the effects they plan to do it to, than makes for a relaxing evening.

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: Great White and Sea Inside

Great White

Written and directed by Will O’Mahoney

Performed by Adriane Daff, Mikala Westall, Will O’Mahoney

Sea Inside

Russya Connor

Text by Rainer Maria Rilke
The Blue Room

Until June 29

Will O'Mahoney and Adriane Daff

There are opening lines, and there are great white opening lines. “Hi – I’m going to eat you!” is undeniably among the latter. When, in Will O’Mahoney’s ambitious Great White, it’s jauntily delivered by a slight girl in retro racing togs, it seems as incongruous as it is attention-grabbing.

But don’t be fooled. The girl (Adriane Daff) is indeed a shark, and her intended victim, Ben (O’Mahoney, who also directs), has plenty to fear from her.

The great white shark haunts the Australian consciousness like nothing else. Even snakes, plane crashes and the other elemental stuff of our nightmares haven’t its grip on our imagination. Perhaps because of its sheer monstrosity, certainly because of its superiority, it make us less at home in an environment that we claim as our birthright.

It’s a potent motif, and a super theatrical device, that O’Mahoney, Daff and Mikala Westall, who plays Ben’s conflicted girlfriend, take full advantage of.