Theatre: Horsehead (★★★)

Longley is the tall one (not horse)

Written and directed by Damon Lockwood
Performed by Damon Lockwood and Sam Longley
Independent Theatre Festival
Subiaco Arts Centre Studio
Until June 6  

The trick with a great idea is knowing how far you can take it. In Horsehead, the writer, director and performer Damon Lockwood had the first, and gets the second, and the result is a proposition that’s impossible to resist – or words to that effect.
Lockwood’s great idea is like Tom Stoppard’s in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead; take two minor characters from a great work and flesh them out, see their blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene in the mighty drama sweeping past them from the inside looking out.
It’s a device that’s driven some eminent artistic ideas: it’s the theme of WH Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts, and Breugal’s The Fall of Icarus that inspired it. It’s a recurring undercurrent in T.S Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.
But that’s all way too hifalutin’, which is something you could never accuse Horsehead of.

Theatre: Macbeth

by William Shakespeare

 Class Act

Directed by Stephen Lee

With Nick Maclaine, Rhoda Lopez, Angelique Malcolm, Shirley Van Sanden, Kyle Sargon, Daniel Buckle, Stephen Lee and Patrick Whitelaw

Subiaco Arts Centre Studio

Until September 14; then in schools

When you watch Shakespeare performed for students, the immortal power of his language most impresses you: “one fell swoop”, “the milk of human kindness” and the “poison’d chalice”, everything that follows that “damned spot” and “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” all come from Macbeth.

Class Act has produced an unpatronising, economical Macbeth for high school students. If its audience (which, by the way, was immaculately attentive throughout the performance I saw) can take these words and ideas away with it, and know from whence they came, that’s a treasure beyond reckoning.

Theatre: Titus Andronicus

William Shakespeare

Her Infinite Variety Ensemble

Directed by Jenny De Reuck

Designed by Sarah Duyvestan

Featuring Nicola Bartlett, Helen Doig, Tiffany Barton, Angelique Malcolm, Natalie Ryan-Brand, Olivia Hogan, Shirley Van Sanden, Mikala Westall, Emma Jermy, Sarah Courtis, Claire Munday and Rhoda Lopez  

Subiaco Arts Centre Studio

Until May 21

The William Shakespeare of the early 1590s was a young man in a big hurry. He’d had some success with a couple of comedies and histories but aimed for a stake in the prestige market for tragedies, which was dominated by Thomas Kyd and the firebrand Christopher Marlowe.

His first foray into tragedy was Titus Andronicus, a messy, ill-formed piece of Ovidian and Senecan bloodbathery that wanted for nothing in energy, for all it lacked in artistic merit. Think of the Saw movie franchise.

So now, 350-odd years later, we’ve got an all-female Titus Andronicus produced by a mono-gender (its description) theatre company aiming to redress the imbalance in male/female opportunities in the acting profession.

That’s a noble enough intention. I just wish it had chosen a more likely vehicle in which to make its debut.