Theatre: I Do I Don’t (★★★)

Written and performed by Whitney Richards
Directed by Rachel Chant
Sound designer and composer Brett Smith
Lighting designer Joe Lui
Choreographer Claire Nichols
Blue Room Theatre
Until September 3

I’m a Whitney Richards fan.
She’s back in town with I Do I Don’t, an honest, often painful, recollection of her early life and fractured family.
It’s clear that there have been some rocky times for her over the past few years in the bigger ponds she’s been swimming in, and this has sparked a desire – compulsion even – to reconstruct the past that she finds in scraps of memory, the casual documents of life, and conversations with family members. 

Read the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Flood

Black Swan State Theatre Company
Written by Chris Isaacs
Directed by Adam Mitchell
Set and costume design by India Mehta
Lighting designer Chris Donelly
Sound designer and composer Ben Collins
With Joshua Brennan, Adriane Daff, Samuel Delich, Will O’Mahony, Whitney Richards and Rose Riley
Heath Ledger Theatre
Until February 2

Chris Isaacs’ Flood is the story of six 20-something Perth friends who reunite for a camping trip into the North-West outback organised by Mike (Joshua Brennan).
Steve (Samuel Delich) and the reluctant Vanessa (Whitney Richards) are a couple; Sal (Will O’Mahony), though, has left his girlfriend behind in Melbourne, where he lives, to join his buddies on the adventure. Their mates, Frankie (Adriane Daff) and Elizabeth (Rose Riley), complete the expedition.
They’re city kids, packed into Mike’s mum and dad’s Tarago, and unprepared for the isolation and dangers of the remote place they’re visiting. When a stranger appears out of the bush while the friends are skinny-dipping in a waterhole, surprise turns to fear, confrontation to violence, and disaster to tragedy.
It’s impossible not to recall Raymond Carver’s short story, So Much Water So Close to Home, and especially its Australian film adaptation, Jindabyne, with its added layer of racism. Isaacs’ story is more, and a fair bit less, than those excruciating parables of guilt and its consequences.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Shrine

Whitney Richards

Tim Winton
Directed by Kate Cherry
Designed by Trent Suidgeest

With Paul Ashcroft, John Howard, Luke McMahon, Sarah McNeill, Will McNeill and Whitney Richards
Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
August 31 – Sept 15, 2013

Shrine, the third of Tim Winton’s annual forays with Black Swan into writing for the stage, leaves unanswered the question posed by his earlier Rising Water (2011) and Signs of Life (2012).
There’s no doubting his quality as a writer, the impact of his language and his instinct for character. He also has a wonderful knack for the transcendent, especially when his characters find themselves alone and exposed to nature.
Is this, though, enough to make him a playwright? Is the poet in Winton also a songwriter?

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Ghosts

By Henrik Ibsen

Class Act Theatre

Directed by Stephen Lee

Performed by Whitney Richards, David Meadows, Graham Mitchell, Angelique Malcolm and Andrew Southern

Subiaco Arts Centre Studio

Until November 3

Who’s afraid of Henrik Ibsen? All that Lutheran hand-wringing. All that rain.

Certainly the audiences that trampled over each other to see Greta Scacchi in Aarne Neeme’s 1991 production of A Doll’s House overcame their qualms, and this production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, in the same building, deserves an audience as well.

Not that it quite justifies trampling; this is a modestly staged production, given a workmanlike rather than inspired treatment by director Stephen Lee, but there’s enough quality on show to make for a worthy evening’s entertainment.

Theatre: Boy Gets Girl

Black Swan State Theatre Company
Written by Rebecca Gilman

Directed by Adam Mitchell

Designed by Fiona Bruce

Lighting design by Trent Suidgeest

Sound design by Ben Collins

Featuring James Hagan, Ben O’Toole, Myles Pollard, Whitney Richards, Helen Searle, Steve Turner and Alison van Reeken

 Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

Until September 30

Alison van Reeken and Myles Pollard

 The opening tableaux of the American playwright Rebecca Gilman’s gripping, malevolent Boy Gets Girl is a striking display of the strengths of director Adam Mitchell’s production.

We find Theresa Bedell (Alison van Reeken), a New York City magazine feature writer, in a set (superbly designed by Fiona Bruce) that is an abstract exercise in perspective, diminishing up a raked stage and down lines of massive re-enforced concrete sections towards a vanishing point obscured in shadows. There’s music, and traffic, but somewhere, close by, Theresa thinks she hears a noise, senses a presence; and we do too. She walks warily upstage towards the darkness, peering into it for the intruder. The stage fades to black. Welcome to her nightmare.

Theatre: Arcadia

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Written by Tom Stoppard

Directed by Kate Cherry

 Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

21 March - April 1, 2012

Scott Sheridan and Whitney Richards        pic: Gary Marsh Photography

If ever a play has mastered the trick of being at once intricate and undemanding, Arcadia, Tom Stoppard’s 1993 intellectual parlour game about four generations of one family in one room but 180 years apart, is it.

The reason is simple; there are all sorts of theories to explain the world, many of which – chaos theory, fractals, Kelvin’s theory of heat, the 2^nd law of thermodynamics, population theory – are given a good going over in Arcadia, but, as the concupiscent Chloe Coverly (Adriane Daff) proclaims, it’s sex that makes it go around.

And it’s sex, in word and deed, which drives this creamily satisfying revival by Kate Cherry’s Black Swan State Theatre Company. There is much bonking done or denied, conspired for or hankered after, in picturesque locations like gazebos and piano rooms – all, I have to report, safely off stage. The talk may be of literary criticism, landscape gardening and all that mathematics, but there’s too, too solid flesh stirring urgently under those elegant muslins and linens (prettily draped by designer Alicia Clements, whose costumes and wedding-cake set are all that could be wished for).

This is not to say that Stoppard’s academic musings are merely a front for a bedroom farce. His ruminations on life, science, art and the pros, cons and pronunciation of ha-has are finely drawn and pleasurable, while the architecture of the play, the easy way it moves its apple from Isaac Newton to Steve Jobs, and the confident, unpushy way the playwright manages internal and external speculation (Did Lord Byron cuckold and kill Ezra Chater? Was Septimus Hodge the hermit in the Coverley’s garden?) is justly admired. It’s all gloriously stimulating and, as long as you don’t fall into the trap of taking Stoppard too seriously – I’m sure he never does – great fun.

Theatre: Anytown

By Hellie Turner

Directed by Janet Pettigrew

Featuring Kingsley Judd, Whitney Richards, Gaynor O’Hare, Matt Penny, Craig Williams and Cathy Lally

Blue Room Theatre

May 10 – 28, 2011

Anytown sits out on the flat and seethes. The little town of a blow-in or two and 900-odd people named Willis bury their dead and dig up their dirt, air their grievances and their dirty linen, and drink from bottomless cups of tea. There’s one road in and one road out of Anytown, and precious few people take either.

Whitney Richards and Craig Williams

In the house of the town cop Charlie and his wife Bella Willis (Matt Penny and Gaynor O’Hare), their delicious sixteen-year-old Dixie (Whitney Richards) hatches her plots. Dixie is a born sexual manipulator; she’s inherited her mother’s carnal allure, but none of her sweetness or resignation. She’s entirely unscrupulous, and entirely indiscriminate, tormenting the mute town boy Paulie (one of several roles played by by Craig Williams) and their scabrous Scottish lodger Angus (Kingsley Judd).

Angus, though, shares a secret with Bella who, in turn, is keeping something from both him and her husband. It’s that kind of town

When a dark stranger (Williams again) appears, bringing with him something mysterious in a hatbox, he represents the chance of escape for Dixie. She goes to work on him, but, for the first time in her life, it just might be her that’s being done over.

Theatre: House of Fun

Fish in a Vortex Productions

Created and directed by Nate Doherty

Featuring Fran Middleton, Mischa Ipp, Whitney Richards and Chris Isaacs

Blue Room Theatre

November 3 – 20, 2010

Welcome to the Lion's Den
Northbridge’s Blue Room Theatre has been mining a rich vein of domestic comedy/dramas lately with The Pride and Jack + Jill, and the motherlode continues with House of Fun, Nate Doherty’s sharp and entertaining story of shared living in Perth.

Three girls, the statuesque, promiscuous Angela (Mischa Ipp), the ambitious Facebook-addicted Gemma (Fran Middleton) and the sweet, naïve Winnie (Whitney Richards) share a house – although not everything in its fridge – with a volatile mixture of camaraderie and bitchiness.

Winnie has a new friend, the charismatic Quentin (Chris Isaacs), who makes a sudden arrival at the house and into their lives. Quentin is trouble, and the hassles he brings and causes drive the story forward.

The early scenes, with the girls staking their various claims on cheese and counter space, are nicely observed, tightly paced and often hilarious. The Blue Room “stage” is only the floor at one end of a room, but the performers’ execution of complex exits and entrances in this limited space is snappy and precise, adding greatly to the momentum of the piece’s dialogue and action.

Whitney Richards (pic: Poppy Penny)

Ipp, Middleton and Richards deliver totally convincing performances; as well as nailing their characters beautifully, their ensemble work is as tight as a water ballet and an entertainment in itself. It’s perhaps unfair to single any of them out, but Whitney Richards is just great as Winnie; she buries herself in sweetness and compels you to care for her character. When she finally realises that Quentin is not the man for her, and worse than that, you want him out of her life just as much as she does.

Isaacs’ performance is also strong, but in the end it’s the housemates you want to hang with, not the intruder.

The strength of the script is its observations on life for 20-somethings in cities like Perth; it’s drawn from stories collected as the project developed (a nascent version had an airing in The Blue Room’s Early Stages program) and they have the unmistakeable ring of truth about them. Far less convincing was the plot line of Quentin’s nefarious activities, and the production sags noticeably while it is being worked through. While it’s obviously necessary to have some dirty work happen to bring Quentin’s relationship with the girls to a head, I’m sure Doherty will find a better vehicle for it if House of Fun gets the further exposure I think it deserves.

An edited version of this review appeared in The West Australian on 17.11.10 read here