Theatre: Picnic at Hanging Rock (★★★★)

by Tom Wright
adapted from Joan Lindsay’s novel
Black Swan State Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre
Directed by Matthew Lutton
Designed by Zoë Atkinson
Lighting design by Paul Jackson
Composer Ash Gibson Greig
Sound design by J. David Franzke
With Harriet Gordon Anderson, Arielle Gray, Amber McMahon, Elizabeth Nabben and Nikki Shiels
Heath Ledger Theatre Until April 17

Arielle Gray, Nikki Shiels, Amber McMahon, Elizabeth Nabben and Harriet Gordon-Anderson (pic Pia Johnson)

The author Bruce Chatwin described Australia as “a country of lost children”. Unlike settled Britain or frontier America, the Australia confronting its European colonists was empty, smothering and malevolent. A wrong step, the unseen crossing of a creek, an open window, and, as in Frederick McCubbin’s Lost or Paul Kelly’s One Night the Moon, the bush closes in.    
It’s unsurprising that Matthew Lutton has been drawn to Picnic at Hanging Rock, an Australian classic and, more than that, part of our mythology.
The achievement of the production is transforming Lindsay’s faux-historicity and the soft-focused erotic mystery of Weir’s film (I’m not its greatest fan) into an all-stops-out horror story.
We never see the Hanging Rock. And this is no picnic.

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Black Diggers (★★★★½)

Queensland Theatre Company
Written by Tom Wright
Directed by Wesley Enoch
Designed by Stephen Curtis
Cast: George Bostock, Luke Carroll, Shaka Cook, Trevor Jamieson, Kirk Page, Guy Simon, Colin Smith, Eliah Watego and Tibian Wyles
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until 7 March



Late in Tom Wright’s Black Diggers, a returned WWI serviceman begins bleeding under the arm, and a piece of shrapnel, buried in his body for decades – a “bit of left-over war” – comes to the surface.
It’s an apt metaphor for the work done by this magnificent piece of storytelling.
Something like 800 indigenous Australian men sidestepped regulations that barred them – as non-European non-citizens – from enlisting in the 1st AIF. They fought at Gallipoli, in Palestine and on the Western Front, and gained respect and comradeship in the trenches, where mud and blood covers all colours of skin, and killing and dying come alike to all races.
For many, though, their homecoming was appalling, their service largely ignored by a country unprepared to afford them the dignity and opportunities of being an Australian, let alone one of its returning heroes.

Theatre: On the Misconception of Oedipus

Malthouse Theatre with Perth Theatre Company

Devised by Zoe Atkinson, Matthew Lutton and Tom Wright

Written by Tom Wright

Directed by Matthew Lutton

Designed by Zoe Atkinson

Lighting design by Paul Jackson

Composition and sound design by Kelly Ryall

Performed by Natasha Herbert, Richard Pyros and Daniel Schlusser

STC Studio Underground

Until September 15

Richard Pyros and Natasha Herbert. Photo: Garth Oriander

In the 18 months since artistic director Melissa Cantwell and general manager Nick Clark took the Perth Theatre Company to its new home in the State Theatre Centre’s Studio Underground, they have polished it to a high gloss.

Because the company has only scant resources to support its ambitions, it’s been a process that has required judiciously cultivated artistic relationships (with the Tim Watts gang and Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre in particular) and Cantwell’s sharp, urban eye for work that delivers on both style and substance.

In this she has much in common with Matthew Lutton, the ludicrously young Perth director now working out of Malthouse. It’s his collaboration with the writer Tom Wright and designer Zoe Atkinson that has delivered Cantwell the brilliantly conceived and executed On the Misconception of Oedipus.

 Link here to the complete review in The West Australian