Perth Festival: Buŋgul ★★★★

pic: Toni Wilkinson

Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupiŋu, Erkki Veltheim and Michael Hohnen

Skinnyfish Music and Perth Festival

Directed by Don Wininba Ganambarr and Nigel Jamieson

Perth Concert Hall

7 - 9 Feb, 2020

Gurrumul Yunipiŋu, the blind, clear-sighted songwriter and musician with an unforgettable voice, died in 2017, leaving behind a saddened nation.

He left us a final gift, an album of songs that combined his own musical heritage and that of the western world, Djarimirri (Child of the Rainbow).

His kinsmen from the Yolŋu country of East Arnhem Land, and his collaborators on the album, the producer Michael Hohnen and the musical director Erkki Velthiem, have brought that album to the stage in an ecstatic union of music, dance, setting, technological wizardry and imagery called Buŋgul, and the result is simply a revelation.

The live performance, directed by Don Wininba Ganambarr and Nigel Jamieson and delivered by traditional voices and instruments and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra under Velthiem’s baton, seamlessly dovetailed with Yunipiŋu’s recorded vocals, reveals the music's full beauty and power.

Add to that some extraordinary visuals, the work of cinematographer Paul Shakeshaft and artists of Yolŋu country, designed by Mic Gruchy and played over Jack Nash’s landscape of a set, all lit by the magnificent illuminations of Mark Howett and you have an overwhelming environment for the music, and the dancers of the Yolŋu.

The performance begins with Bäru, the Wagnarian songline of the crocodile, with the dancers lying in a circle of sand, being painted for ceremony around a smoking mound that, seen from above in a projected image, is sharply reminiscent of JMW Turner’s explosive suns.

The live dance is mirrored in Shakeshaft’s films of the same dancers in Country, and the vivid colours and lushness of bush and seas makes their deep attachment to it axiomatic.

The music continues, reaching phenomenal heights in tracks like the pulsating title track, with its passages of exuberant tintinnabulation (John Adams comes to mind) and the glorious glissando of Gapu (Tuna Swimming), Shakeshaft’s camera skimming along the surface of the water, sometimes diving beneath, sometimes leaping above.

In my mind’s eye I could see Peter Gabriel with these songs and this setting. It was a perfect fit.  

The sun sets, red and glowing, in Djäpana. Octopuses glide through the water, the sails of the traders from Sulawesi appear on the horizon as they have for half a millennia, all caught in sights and sounds and the rhythm of the dance.

Finally, dark clouds gather in Wulminda, and the image of them pulls slowly back to reveal the face of Gurrumul in Guy Maestri’s Archibald Award-winning portrait, and his sightless eyes miss nothing.

If I have a reservation about Buŋgul, it’s simply that it has an embarrassment of riches. There’s occasionally a redundancy of sensation, in particular between the live and filmed dancers, which robbed a little from each, especially as these traditional dances are full of nuance and deep meaning rather than spectacle and variety.

Surround that with the wonderful imagery, the lighting, the orchestra, and you often didn’t quite know where to look.

But if that’s its problem, all but the greatest productions would love to have it.

Perth Festival: Hecate ★★★★

Adapted and translated from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth
by Kylie Bracknell and Dr Clint Bracknell

Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company

in association with Bell Shakespeare

Directed by Kylie Bracknell

Set and costume designer Zoë Atkinson

Lighting designer Mark Howett

Composer, musical director and sound designer Dr Clint Bracknell

Dramaturg Kate Mulvany

Subiaco Arts Centre until 16 Feb

One fell swoop (pic Dana Weeks)

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Perhaps the greatest passage in all of Shakespeare, ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow’ is the radioactive core burning in the heart of the nuclear reaction that is Macbeth.

I reproduce it in full for the sheer marvel of its genius: ‘To the last syllable of recorded time’, with its intimations of galaxies and eternities in seven words, never fails to astound me.

Leave aside its bleak part in the rise and downfall of the homicidal king, its withering insight into his character and psychology, or the opportunities (and histrionic perils) it gives to the actor performing it, these ten lines stand as one of the most powerful and formative achievements of the English language.

And it is language, more than plot, or character, or even performance, that makes Hecate, a skilfully reconstructed but essentially faithful retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy entirely in the Noongar language of South-Western Australia, so remarkable.

Both these plays mark a critical moment in the histories of their respective languages. In Macbeth’s case, it comes at the apogee of the decade from 1597 to 1607 – from Henry IV to Antony and Cleopatra – when Shakespeare unleashed the full potential of the English language; in the case of Hecate, at the point where the ancient Noongar language rises back from near-obliteration to demonstrate its emotional power and continuing viability.

For this much credit is due to a band of senior Noongar people who kept their language alive (the Hecate programme notes that of the 30,000 people who identify as Noongar, only two per cent speak the language at home, although that number is rising).

In the context of this production, the grand endeavour of the former artistic director of Yirra Yaakin, Kyle Morrison, who, eight years ago, conceived the “Noongar Shakespeare project” that has already taken translations of the sonnets to the Globe Theatre in London, cannot be praised enough.

High among his greatest achievements is his willingness to gift the realisation of his dream on to others, to the director Kylie Bracknell, who, with her husband Clint, also adapted and translated Shakespeare’s text, and, finally (I understand), the role of Macbeth to the distinguished Noongar actor Maitland Schnaars.

Morrison’s reward, which he celebrated so exuberantly at the end of the opening night’s performance, was to see his work come to reality (and also, it should be noted, his own magnetic performance in a number of supporting roles in the production).

Now to the play (which, after all, is the thing).

One of the defining ideas of this interpretation of Macbeth is the elevation of Hecate to its title role. In the original, Hecate (in Greek mythology the Goddess of magic and witchcraft; in Shakespeare the sovereign of the ‘weird sisters’ who trigger Macbeth’s downfall) only appears very briefly – indeed there’s compelling technical evidence that Shakespeare may not have written the character, that may have been inserted later by another hand.

Here she (Della Rae Morrison) is the observer of all that befalls, a seer and a spirit protector of boodjar – the land, a comforter of the distressed.

Her witches are replaced by an ensemble of ‘mischief-makers’, played at one time or another by all the rest of the nine-member cast.

These changes by Bracknell and the dramaturg Kate Mulvany (my God, that woman must sleep no more!) give the narrative and staged action a fluidity and vigour in which Shakespeare’s original characters, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth (Bobbi Henry), Banquo (Rubeun Yorkshire) Macduff (Ian Wilkes) Malcolm (Mark Nannup) and Duncan (Trevor Ryan) live and die.

Their names are the only words in English – I lie, I think there’s one English phrase slipped mischievously into the script, like the single upside-down panel in an otherwise perfectly symmetrical Japanese temple frieze. 
And be prepared: there are no subtitles, and a plan I believe was once in place to provide a plot summary in English before each act was replaced by a synopsis in the programme. Bravo, I say!

Apart from those structural changes, the familiar storyline is told with little deviation from the original; Banquo’s ghastly appearance at Macbeth’s banquet is there, as are the murderers’ fell swoop on Macduff’s wife and pretty ones, the woods closing in on Macbeth and, in the end, Macduff’s revenge in a brutal fight to the death with hands shaped as daggers, superbly choreographed by Yorkshire and performed – danced really – by Schnaars and Wilkes.

The creative team for Hecate deliver outstanding results: Zoë Atkinson’s cascading set of rough panels, screens and abysses frames the action brilliantly, while lighting designer Mark Howett continues his triumphant Perth festival (his work on Buŋgul is simply amazing) with blood-red and ice-blue washes of dark colour across the set, faces and forms etched against the blackness behind.

I left Hecate with a selfish reservation. For many Noongar people, their language is in the process of rediscovery, and, unavoidably, its expression is a conscious effort that showed in sometimes-laboured delivery of the text.

After the show, though, in the wonderful gathering place created as an adjunct to the play in the Subiaco Arts Centre gardens (which, incidentally, I think of as my own boodjar, around which my children were born and schooled, my family lived worked and played), I listened to Bracknell and Morrison speak of their deep reverence for Shakespeare, of their love of their own language and the long challenge for it to return to that unconscious, natural fluency and eloquence it would once have had.

Hecate is one imperfect, sometimes halting, but courageous and ultimately triumphant step towards that goal, while we wait for a Noongar Shakespeare to emerge to unleash its full potential.

FRINGE WORLD 2020

Here we go again! Welcome to Turnstile's run-down of the shows we've seen at Fringe World 2020. 

These spot reviews will often link to full pieces either on Turnstiles or Seesaw Magazine. Shows that you can still see come first, those whose runs have finished follow.

I hope that all makes sense, and that what you're reading here helps you make some of those tricky "will-I-or-won't-I" fringe choices. 

Thunderstruck ★★★★

Girl's School until Feb 16.

Whether of not you like that bruising caterwaul of an instrument, the Great Highland Bagpipe, you'll love David Colvin's semi-autobiographical story of a boy who grew up in its thrall, and the flawed genius who inspired him. Comes complete with a deliciously obscene Princess Di story.
Link here to my review in Seesaw

30 Day Free Trial ★★★½

Blue Room Theatre until Feb 8

Porn is everywhere, and it was only a matter of time and opportunity before indie darlings Charlotte Ottons and Andrew Sutherland tried their hand at it. Sort of. The result is slick, sexy and nowhere near as shallow and dehumanising as ts subject.
Link here to my review in Seesaw

A Special Day ★★★★½

Girl's School until Feb 16.

May 8, 1938 is a special day for the occupants of an apartment building in Rome as Adolf Hitler rolls into town to meet Benito Mussolini. It will be a special hour for you if you see this lovely, superbly performed and inventive play from Mexico.
Link here to my review in Seesaw  

Bernie Dieter's Little Death Club ★★★★½
WA Spiegeltent until Feb 16.
Since an infamous night in 2013 when Bernie Dieter aka Bernadette Byrne aka Jennifer Byrne from Koln via London via Warrandyte (it's true - she's just a suburban girl!) sat on my lap in a spiegeltent and  crooned something torchy in my reddening ear, I've been a helpless acolyte, drawn like a moth to the flame of her fabulous showvampship.
This new show is the apotheosis of her talent, as a performer, and as an empressario. Unlike the previous, gloriously filthy but a little rag-tag LDC, this show is as tight as a drag queen's leopard-skin cheongsam. (the drag queen in question is Art Simone, the RuPaul Drag Con "Performer of the Year", one of four guest artistes only unmemorable because of the company they kept). 
There's a funky four-piece, all the production bells and whistles but it's all Madame Dieter, swallowing the spotlight whole with her impossible eyes, her jagged mouth, her daring original songs and her fabulous ability to turn an audience into cats confronted by cream. Jesus she's good at it!
We're lucky this year to have Meow Meow in town, Amanda Palmer (the artist most like Dieter in stance and talent) too when the grown-ups festival rolls into Perth. 
Do not, under any circumstances, miss any of them.

The Gods The Gods The Gods ★★★★

De Parel Spiegeltent until Feb 9

Ragnarokkr ★★½

The Blue Room  until Feb 8

Two shows based on ancient mythology, both from companies with strings of hits behind them. One, from the Greeks is another bobbydazzler; the other, from the Vikings, not so much.
Link here to my omnibus review of both shows in Seesaw 

 On Stage Dating ★★★½

The Library at Girl's School until Feb 16.

Bron Batten is a dating machine, Ryan the accountant from the audience made all the right moves, and it all made for a swipe right night.
Link here to my review in Seesaw


Eurydice ★★★★

Shambles at the Pleasure Garden until Feb 9

Ye Gods –they've done it again! The gang who brought you the triumphant Orpheus last year are back with the other side of the great Greek myth.
Link here to my review in Seesaw

Amateur Hour ★★★★
The Rechabite Sundays Jan 26 – Feb 16  

The South African duo Jemma Kahn and Glen Biderman Pam are bringing their wonderful The Epicene Butcher back to the Fringe this year (see below), but their late-night show is far from a throwaway. A deep dark take on talent shows, it’s terribly funny and more than a little savage. It'll be a hard ticket to get.

Franz Kafka’s 1917 short story, A Report to an Kafka’s Ape ★★★★½
Franz Kafka’s 1917 short story, A Report to an Academy, is made for the stage, and the resulting adaptation by Phala O. Phala (who also directs) of Ian Johnston’s translation is both true to the original and revelatory.

The story, a parable of the absorption of the outsider into the dominant culture, and the emptiness it results in, is given dramatic force and a fascinating horror because the outsider of the play is an ape (Tony Bonani Miyambo) who survives and escapes captivity by literally becoming a man. What he gains, though, is not freedom but merely escape, a way out. A free ape becomes a prisoner without chains, but with a great emptiness in his heart.

By all reports, Kafka’s story is an allegory of the “westernization” of Jews in Europe, but Phila and Miyambo have transposed it to the African experience. It’s an uncomfortable experience to see a black man playing an ape (Australian audiences will be drawn inexorably to the vilification of Adam Goodes in this context) but Miyambo’s performance has such dignity and self-respect that the insight and rare beauty of Kafka’s language is a joy to experience.

It’s a marvelous performance, full of technical quality and humour (a mild "beware the front row" warning is appropriate, unless you have fleas) and a must-see opener for the Fringe.

Body Rights ★★★½
Isn’t it a marvel that one of the most eagerly-awaited productions at this year’s Fringe World should be from the WA Youth Theatre Company!

 It’s all due, of course, to their spellbinding and brilliantly executed Rest, the winner of the Martin Sims award at last year’s festival.

While Body Rights doesn’t reach the heights of Rest, the strengths and sense of purpose of WAYTCO is on show once again with these four short plays about bodies and the right of young people to determine what happens to and with them.

WAYTCO’s artistic director James Berlyn created and directed three of the pieces: Will the story of a young singer facing an extraordinary decision as his voice starts to break; Adrian’s Soul, a series of one-on-one meetings between the audience and young performers with stories to tell; and ARCO an exploration of the life and thoughts of a person with autism performed by the autistic performer Adam Kelly.

The fourth piece, Boxed In, co-created and directed by Phoebe Sullivan, explores the work young women put into their bodies, and the fears that at least partly drive them.

The plays take place in two rooms at Girl’s School, with the staging, large cast and audience expertly mashalled by stage manager Anastasia Julien-Martial.

Adrian’s Soul is closest in spirit to Rest and ARCO provides the night’s most striking and euphoric moments, but all the pieces, and the whole production, are valuable, finely delivered and well worth your attention.

Talkback ★★★

It's devilishly hard to stage anything supernatural in a tiny black box theatre like The Blue Room, especially during fringe frenzy with no time to set effects, and especially when its a thriller. But director Elise Wilson and her actors (Monica Main a standout) make a decent fist of the story of a radio medium whose past literally comes back to haunt her.
Link here to my review in Seesaw

French Over ★★★

Izzy McDonald, the creator of the Martin Sims award-winning Bus Boy, returns with the story of a bonfire and the people who annually are drawn to it. Singular staging, a powerful cast (Alicia Osyka outstanding) and quality dialogue make for an interesting and touching piece, despite some structural flaws.
Link here to my review in Seesaw

Zack Adams: Love Song for Future Girl ★★★

I'm a huge fan of Shane Adamczak, the comedian, actor and writer and alter-ego of Zack Adams (as his name suggests), but, though Love Songs is funny, sad and a bit wise, I've got some reservations...
Link here to my review in Seesaw

The Epicene Butcher ★★★★½

The Epicene Butcher comes in an exotic form – the venerable Japanese story-telling art of Kamishibai, literally “paper drama”.

The show begins traditionally enough, with the story of a fat, cranky monk and a man who travels a hundred miles for the answer to life. Things get decidedly weird thereafter, with a brutally pornographic story of a hentai fantasy girl and the lonely boy who imagines her, and a grimly hilarious reworking of the now classic quest by Mario to rescue Princess Peach.

Most powerful of all is the title story, a haunting epic of love, perversion and cannibalism that silenced the audience. They stayed quiet for the wordless, black-and-white Fukushima, a sombre telling of Japan’s nuclear disaster. At the end, a rambunctious, irreverent telling of the life of Nelson Mandela in pidgin Japanese brought a happy crowd back from the disparate cultures and climes this extraordinary little show had taken us to.

Quokka Apocalypse★★★
A bunch of endangered native animals hatch a plot to destroy our water desalination plants and make us join them in extinction. I can buy that.Link here to my review in Seesaw

Orpheus ★★★★½

The best show at the 2019 Fringe, the exuberant, propulsive retelling of the Orpheus myth sat in a North-of-England Pub returns, along with two more shows inspired by those clever old Greeks, Eurydice and The Gods The Gods The Gods.

Make sure you see it – I bet you’ll want to see the others as well.
Here's my review in Seesaw last year. 

Coming soon to Turnstiles:

Ballads Banksias and Beauty

Adult Storytime #3
Star Power

THANK YOU!

I really appreciate you calling by Turnstiles to see what's going on in theatre and other popular arts in Perth.

Despite the absence of new postings on the site, I want to assure you that I'm not dead and that Turnstiles is also still alive, even if it hasn't been kicking lately.

There's a very good reason for this; I'm one of the reviewers and arts journalists who's migrated to the great new arts website Seesaw, and you can find all my latest reviews and other musings – along with those of other quality writers – by going to

seesawmag.com.au
(don't forget the "mag")

I promise I'll get Turnstiles back up-to-date over the coming holidays, and look forward to keeping you in the loop over what is shaping to be an exciting 2020 festival season and beyond. In the meantime – see you on the Seesaw!  

Theatre: Floor Thirteen

By Elise Wilson

Directed by Marshall Stay

Performed by Kylie Bywaters, Tamara Creasey, Courtney Henri, Christopher Moro and Jordan Valentini

Blue Room Theatre

Until 13 July

Elise Wilson is on some sort of trajectory. The 2018 WAAPA performing arts graduate dashed downtown from the Mt Lawley campus to the Blue Room where she’s been making waves as an actor in shows like Hive Mind and Grace (with much more to come this year). Even some of her purposeful performances as the theatre’s usher during the fringe stopped the chatter in the Blue Room’s foyer – now that’s an achievement!  

She’s also found time to write, and Floor Thirteen, her first full-length play, is the result. It’s an auspicious debut.

A young, smart and aspirational lawyer, Phoebe (Kylie Bywater), is heading home from a party at her client’s apartment to celebrate his win in the big court case she’d been working on. She’s more than a little drunk, and much more than a little unsettled, so the last thing she needs is the lift to stick, somewhere between the fourteenth and twelfth floor.

Help is at hand, and soon a reassuring technician’s voice is keeping her calm while he sorts out the problem.

But calm isn’t on the agenda for Phoebe’s night, and the reason isn’t because she’s stuck in a lift. It’s what has happened that night, before she got in the lift, that has got her seriously unglued, and it’s finding out why that was – why that really was ­–­ that is Wilson’s story.

Floor Thirteen is about memory, how we build it and how it peels away like onionskin to expose the truth.

Wilson has worked closely with the producer/director/designer Marshall Stay and Bywaters, also recent WAAPA grads, and the result – the core of the production – is tight, clear and tense. Stay’s set, an all-but-transparent box representing the lift is a perfect performance space for Bywaters, and she brings Phoebe to nervy, jagged life. Stay’s ever-so-slightly-distorted soundscape and Scott McArdle’s lighting design amplify the uneasy energy and edginess of the text, and Bywaters’ performance.

However, there’s more to Floor Thirteen than one actor playing one stranded woman; as the unstable layers of Phoebe’s memory of events are exposed, they are performed as tableaux by an ensemble of performers – Tamara Creasey, Courtney Henri, Christopher Moro and Jordan Valentini – circling the lift. They silently mouth the conversations Phoebe remembers, or concocts, and give physical form to the shifting reality of events.

It’s tightly devised (“movement dramaturgy” – a new one for me – by Jessica Russell) and performed, but I’m not convinced it adds materially to the text or our understanding of its voice.

I’ve great admiration for the performing arts course at WAAPA, and the work it does to train students across the range of disciplines involved in theatre making. Because of the mix of forms and performance it employs, Floor Thirteen felt like an extension of that work, and that training, rather than a fully autonomous production. .

Whether that makes for the best use of these talents, or whether it best serves the text, is an unanswered question.  I left Floor Thirteen feeling I’d like to see it again, but this time with just the story, the actor and the technician’s disembodied voice, to make that judgement.

Theatre: The Double ★★★★

Written and directed by Clare Testoni

Lighting designed by Rhiannon Petersen

Sound design by Jou Lui

Performed by Phoebe Sullivan, Amanda Watson and Michelle Aitken

Blue Room Theatre

Phoebe Sullivan meets her double

The Blue Room theatre has broken with tradition and combined both its 2019 seasons (not counting its Summer Nights fringe festival and Winter Nights development offerings) into one year-long celebration of WA’s independent contemporary theatre.

Whether that’s clever marketing or sheer one-upmanship, the fifteen productions from now until December shape as an impressive, attention-grabbing body of work.

And its opening production, Clare Testoni’s sci-fai fable, The Double, is a perfect pilot for the series.

Testoni has made a quantum leap as a deviser and executor of theatre over the past couple of years, exploiting her skill as a shadow puppeteer, image-maker and imaginative interpreter of fairy tales.

Through it her work has become provocative, sophisticated and highly entertaining. Her developing power was demonstrated last year by Tale of Tales, a highlight of the Blue Room season, and the startling intergalactic panorama she created with Tim Watts for The Last Great Hunt’s Stay With Us.

The Double is even more ambitious, incorporating digital imagery and masking in the Faustian story of a struggling actor who sells her image to a megalithic corporation, risking her identity and soul in the process.

It’s richly intriguing to see how Testoni has used her skills and interests in new ways, so that you’re rarely aware that The Double essentially remains puppetry and her story a fairy tale.

Her three actors, Phoebe Sullivan, Amanda Watson and Michelle Aitken, morph skilfully into the central character, Victoria, her computer generated doppelganger, Vivy, and the relatives and friends, agents and corporate geeks who regale her (Aitken, in particular, is strange and compelling).

We most often see them as distorted projected images, accentuating the shape-shifting, manipulated realities of modern marketing and image creation. Testoni, who also directs, handles the metatheatrics of this process with aplomb

The story progresses with unhurried clarity through all this technology and theatrics, even if it finally doesn’t yet quite achieve its emotional potential. It provides a solid platform for Testoni’s Cartesian thesis on the reality of self in a digitally generated world,.

In fairytales and science fiction, the creator has to go beyond present reality to fetch her story, but, for The Double, Testoni doesn’t have to go too far to find it.

So much so that I couldn’t help wondering, as I watched this pertinent and excellently delivered production, how Gabrielle Miller must feel when she sees herself, everywhere, as the Trivago Girl.

Theatre: You Know We Belong Together

Julia Hales

by Julia Hales with Finn O’Branagáin and Clare Watson
Black Swan Theatre Company
Directed by Clare Watson
Set and costume designer Tyler Hill
Lighting designer Joe Lui
Composer and sound designer Rachael Dease
Performed by Julia Hales, Joshua Bott, Patrick Carter, Tina Fielding, Mark Junor, Melissa Junor, Lauren Marchbank and Hermione Merry
Heath Ledger Theatre until March 31  

There is wonderful warmth about You Know We Belong Together. It envelops the audience, creating a shared, joyous experience of the rarest kind in theatre.
Its lead artist Julia Hales has Down Syndrome, as do her co-performers Joshua Bott, Patrick Carter, Lauren Marchbank, Tina Fielding, Melissa and Mark Junor.
Hales’s research into love and belonging for people with DS blossomed with the contributions of the writer Finn O’Branagáin and director Clare Watson into a genuinely impressive piece of verbatim theatre about life, family, hopes, desire, dreams and the part DS plays in all of them.
Much of the show consists of pre-recorded interviews with the performers about these life matters. (It’s important to realize that life expectancy for people with DS has gone from 25 years as recently as the 1980s to over 60 today, bringing with it a whole host of new challenges and opportunities.)
But let me dispel any suspicion that this is a dry, worthy, didactic piece – far from it. It overflows with happiness and real charm as these lovely and loving people tell us their stories. Some of them – the gorgeous romance of the Junors from Augusta is an outstanding example – are deeply moving; others are funny, sexy and sad.
It’s simply and shrewdly designed by Tyler Hill and lit by Joe Lui. Rachael Dease has composed an effective, unobtrusive soundtrack for the show. 
These are stories of people who are as whole and emotionally alive as any of us.
Hales’ obsession with the eternally-running TV soap Home and Away locates and drives the show. Her real friends meet in the Summer Bay café of her imagination; its beach and the real one near her family’s Eagle Bay holiday house fold together in her mind. Her own tragedies and the melodramatic happenings in the fictional lives of H & A reflect each other, and the final scene (I won’t spoil the surprise and sheer euphoria of it) wraps and ties a ribbon around this little gift of a play.
This season is an extended encore of the show's premiere at the 2018 Perth Festival. It's success there has also earned it a relocation to the mainstage Heath Ledger Theatre.
 It was a a delightful and touching show on its first outing (this review is essentially the same as it was then), and has lost nothing this time around.