Theatre: They Ran 'til they Stopped

The Duck House/ Performing Lines

Written by Gita Bezard

Featuring Whitney Richards, Arielle Gray and Lawrence Ashford

PICA

November 10 - 19, 2011

Whitney Richards and Arielle Gray

An empty place at a table is like a hole in the heart. It’s the pointy end of grief, a reminder that you cannot go back, and cannot stay the same.

Gita Bezard’s They Ran ’til they Stopped tells of what happens to three people when the fourth of their household dies. We never know what happened to her, all we know is that she is gone.

It's unsettling and uneasy (and this reviewer confesses he came to it after a too-long day), and sometimes feels more an exercise than a fully realised piece, but it’s fine work by some emerging theatre practitioners.


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian   

Theatre: Lorelei

Deckchair Theatre

Devised by Mark Storen and Chris Bendall

Directed by Chris Bendall

Musical director Tim Cunniffe

Design Fiona Bruce

Featuring Rhoda Lopez and Mark Storen

The Lorelei, the siren who lured Rhine shipmen onto the rocks with her song, returns as a cabaret singer who entrances a wandering sailor in this pastiche of songs, some of ports and the sea, by Mark Storen and Chris Bendall, who also directs.

Storen plays Buzzard, the lonely sailor, enchanted by the vamp Lorelei (Rhoda Lopez) and led by her across the seven seas to ports from here to New York City.

Let’s start at the top. Fiona Bruce has delivered a winning design for the show, with cabaret tables dotting the floor and stages surrounding the audience. It’s fun to be in and great to look at as the two performers bob up around and among you. Lopez starts in spectacular form, with Jacques Brel’s Amsterdam, and is shipshape and sexy throughout. Storen’s powerful and somewhat threatening aura makes his capsize from someone who might do anything to Lorelei into someone who would do anything for her even more effective.

Theatre: Slut

Little y Theatre

Written by Patricia Cornelius

Directed by Emily McLean

Featuring Chloe Flockhart, Liz Frodsham, Nicole Warren, Megan Moir, Georgia King, Alexandra Neil and Sarah McKellar

Blue Room Theatre

Until November 19

Georgia King

The Little y Theatre, formed by Georgia King, Mischa Ipp and the late Alexis Davis in 2010, made a galvanizing debut in June with Scent Tales, one of the real highlights of the Perth stage this year.  This production is very much King’s baby. She’s a terrific young performer, and her assured style permeates this story of a girl, Lolita, fallen down, as told by her seven friends and classmates.

When it all comes together, as in the fabulous funny-scary scene when the girls, in their “angry year”, prowl and snarl through an adolescent pre-menstrual animal kingdom, there is anger, humour and insight in equal measure. When their focus is not themselves and their own lives, but Lolita the Slut and hers, it loses these qualities.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian          

Theatre: Music from the Whirlwind

by John Aitken

Directed and designed by Lawrie Cullen-Tait

Performed by Brendan Ewing

The Metcalfe Playhouse

3 – 5 November, 2011

Theatre should give us entertainment, emotion and education. Whatever else you say about the revival of Music from the Whirlwind, WA playwright John Aitken’s powerful exposé of the dangerous relationship between Dmitri Shostakovich and the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, it certainly delivers on the last of these. Brendan Ewing, the edgy, distinctive actor who plays the Russian composer in this single hander, provides plenty of the others.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: When the Rain Stops Falling

Black Swan State Theatre Company

Written by Andrew Bovell

Directed by Adam Mitchell

Designed by Bryan Woltjen

Lighting design by Trent Suidgeest

Sound design by Ben Collins

Featuring Vivienne Garrett, Julia Moody, Fiona Pepper, Igor Sas, Scott Sheridan, Steve Turner and Alison van Reeken

 Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre

Until November 13

Julia Moody and Scott Sheridan (pic: Gary Marsh)

With the sad, exquisite When the Rain Stops Falling, Black Swan have unquestionably kept the best of their first year’s tenure as the core tenant of the State Theatre Centre ‘till last.

Andrew Bovell’s family saga charts the lives of seven connected characters over four generations, eighty years and two continents; it’s a complex, highly structured work that requires the utmost clarity in its script and staging to avoid disintegrating into confusion. That it succeeds so well is greatly to the credit of Bovell’s disciplined, highly literate writing and the painstaking management of scenes and characters by director Adam Mitchell. It is also indebted to a cast of West Australian actors who would, I think, do it proud on any stage, anywhere.

Theatre: Blood Will Have Blood

Excerpts from William Shakespeare

Directed by John Sheedy

Set and costume designer Daniel Ampuero

Performed by WAAPA 3^rd Year Acting students Ben O’Toole, Lara Schwerdt, Griffin Blumer, Ryan Jones, Jessica Clarke, Kali Hulme, Joshua Brennan, Emma Chelsey, Michael Drysdale, Charlotte Hazzard, Philippe Klaus, Nicole Shostak, Nic Westaway, Alex Williams and Gemma Willing

Subiaco Arts Centre

October 22 - 27, 2011

Griffin Blumer and Emma Chelsey

WAAPA’s class of 2011 have topped off their training with a wild ride through Shakespeare at the Subiaco Arts Centre in Blood Will Have Blood. While it didn't work at all for me as a piece of cogent theatre, the imagination of the guest director, Barking Gecko’s John Sheedy, and the talented student designer Daniel Ampuero deliver a fascinating exercise for these dazzling young things, and a glimpse of what they will become.

Theatre: Adam and Eve

The Wet Weather Ensemble
Devised by Ian Sinclair, Moya Thomas and the cast

Directed by Moya Thomas

With St John Cowcher, Alicia Osyka, Ian Sinclair and Moana Lutton

The Blue Room Theatre

October 11 - 29, 2011

This Adam and Eve is an exhilarating account of man’s first disobedience, the fruit of a forbidden tree and the loss of Eden. A modern re-telling of The Fall could easily descend into mere parody or undergraduate piffle, but in the hands of director Moya Thomas and a cracking quartet of young actors, there’s not the slightest risk of that happening.

The hilariously droll St John Cowcher sets the tone in best Hugh Laurie (pre-House) style, and from then on it’s a whacky rollercoaster ride of cultural references and theatrical tomfoolery. Along the way the lost and lonely Adam (Ian Sinclair) meets his heavenly Eve (Moana Lutton) out the back of a club called Eden, and it’s love, and the fate of mankind, at first glance. It’s as if there’s no-one but them in the world.