Theatre: The Manganiyar Classroom (★★★★)

Devised and directed by Roysten Abel
Regal Theatre
3-5 March

The boys enter like snails creeping unwillingly to school, but, an hour later, when they prance off stage to the beat of the drums, they’ve delivered an exuberant, and utterly adorable, finale to our festival season.
So ancient are their songs that they tell stories of Alexander the Great, whose army finally mutinied only a riverbank or two away, twenty-three centuries ago.
In recent years, the Manganiyar have come from their arid homes and toured the world in shows like The Manganiyar Seduction, which thrilled Perth audiences at PIAF 2011.
Its director, Roysten Abel, returns with the boys of The Manganiyar Classroom, and a message. He is distressed by the effect India’s homogenised education system is having on kids who, like these boys, are born with music in their veins. His show is a protest against that deadening of the spirit, and part of his campaign to establish an alternative education system for Manganiyar children that encourages their unique gifts and heritage.

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Lady Eats Apple (★★★★)

Back to Back Theatre
Directed by Bruce Gladwin
Composer Chris Abrahams
Designed by Mark Cuthbertson
Projection design by Rhian Hinkley
Sound designer Marco Cher-Gibard
Devised and performed by Mark Deans, Simon Laherty, Romany Latham, Brian Lipson, Sarah Mainwaring and Scott Price
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until 5 March

There’s a dilemma that confronts an audience at theatre of the disabled. There are two ways of approaching it, and each requires a compromise.
Do we see the performance through the prism of disability, and react to what we see in those terms? Or do we take the view that performance, and performers, must be measured against an objective, universal standard, disability or no?
There is a third possibility, though, one that renders it inconsequential. That is that the disabled, in possession of a particular vision and expression, can approach and communicate a mystery we might not unravel by other means.
When that mystery is as huge as mortality and death, and when, as in Lady Eats Apple, the performance is supported by extraordinary technical and creative accomplishment, the impact can be tremendous.

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: An Evening with an Immigrant ★★★½

Inua Ellams
STC Studio

If everyone could have a good, long conversation with everyone else, would the world be a safer, more welcoming place for all the people who live in it?
If we all knew each other’s stories, would we then know too much to argue or to judge?
These questions spring from the poet/ playwright Inua Ellams’ story, from his family’s complicated history in northern Nigeria to his still not yet completely secure present life in Britain.
Ellams sits comfortably in a chair throughout, the only visible sign of “performance” a deck on which he cues the impressive music of DJ Sid Mercutio that accompany the poems that bookmark his story.
His poems are unexpectedly traditional and instantly accessible. Heavily alliterative and drivingly rhythmic, they skirt the border of rap and are both a sturdy vehicle for Ellams’ story and an entertainment in themselves.

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: The Gabriels (★★★★★)

Public Theatre
Written and directed by Richard Nelson
Designed by Susan Hilferty and Jason Ardizzone-West
Lighting designed by Jennifer Tipton
Sound designed by Scott Lehrer and Will Pickens
Featuring Mag Gibson, Lynn Hawley, Roberta Maxwell, Maryann Plunkett, Jay O. Sanders and Amy Warren
Subiaco Arts Centre
Until February 18

Early in What Did You Expect, the second of the trilogy of plays that constitutes Richard Nelson’s The Gabriels, we are told a story translated from a Russian play.
Two old men stand outside an apartment block. Through its windows, they can see a happy family enjoying their time together. What the old men know, but the family inside doesn’t, is that the family’s daughter has just drowned in the river.
It’s a moment deeply reminiscent of the “fell swoop” scene in Macbeth, or the playful family scene in The Wild Duck that presages its catastrophe.
It is the fulcrum of The Gabriels, a dagger in the heart of its story. We have been beautifully prepared for it, and events – or the discovery of them – follow swiftly after.
It’s one example of the invisible architecture of this intimate, monumental American masterpiece.