Theatre: A Streetcar Named Desire

Written by Tennessee Williams
Directed by Kate Cherry
Designed by Christina Smith
Sound designer and composer Ben Collins
With Ben D’Addario, Nathaniel Dean, Callum Fletcher, Luke Hewitt, Michael Loney, Rhoda Lopez, Jo Morris, Sigrid Thornton, Steve Turner, Alison van Reeken and Irma Woods

Black Swan State Theatre Company 
Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
Extended to April 11

There’s no doubt about A Streetcar Named Desire. Its impact on the American stage and its cinema, and the consequences of its writing and performance are still with us 67 years after its debut.
Its tumultuous reception, the famous opening-night standing ovation, the huge critical and popular success that followed it, and the 1951 film version, suggest audiences were ready to see real life, its violence, its sexuality and the savagery with which it tears down anachronism, pretention and delusion, played as it is for what it is.
Which all makes Streetcar a tricky conveyance for its director and stars.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: WAAPA class of 2014

Hair
Book/ lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado
Music by Galt MacDermot
Director and choreographer Tanya Mitford
Music director David King
Set designer Hannah Metternick-Jones
Costume designer Georgia Metternick-Jones
Performed by WAAPA 3rd Year Music Theatre students
Geoff Gibbs Theatre, WAAPA
 
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
By Bertolt Brecht
Director Michael Jenn
Set designer Sarah Olivia Tartaglia
Costume designer Sarah Duyvestyn
Performed by WAAPA 3rd Year Acting students
Roundhouse Theatre, WAAPA
 
March 14 - 22 2014
 
The first round of productions at the WA Academy of Performing Arts is like the first round of the footy season. What will the new kids be like? Who’ll be the stars?
WAAPA unveiled its 2014 graduating classes in acting and music theatre in two sprawling, messy and entertaining productions.
The messiness, I hasten to add, was not the fault of the young performers or their mentors. Both Hair and Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui were written on the run, and it shows. 


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: The Guys

By Anne Nelson
Directed by Paula Coops
Performed by Anna Bennetts and Adam T Perkins
Subiaco Arts Centre Studio
March 12 – 15, 2014

The images are frozen in time; the planes, the burning towers, the awful collapse. Twelve years on, we still see the world through the prism of that terrible morning, that desperately empty skyline.
Anne Nelson’s The Guys was an almost immediate response to the tragedy of 9/11, debuting less than three months later, with Bill Murray as Nick, a New York Fire Department captain who lost eight men in the collapse, and Sigourney Weaver as Joan, the writer helping him compose the eulogies he must give at their memorial services.

Theatre: The Shadow King

William Shakespeare's King Lear 
adapted by Michael Kantor and Tom E Lewis
Malthouse Theatre
Directed by Michael Kantor
Designed by Paul Jackson, Michael Kantor and David Miller
Musical direction John Rodgers
Performed by Jada Alberts, Jimi Bani, Frances Djulibing, Rarriwuy Hick, Damion Hunter, Kamahi Djordon King, Tom E. Lewis and Natasha Wanganeen, with musicians Selwyn Burns, Djakapurra Munyarryun and Bart Willoughby
Heath Ledger Theatre until 1 March
 
Let’s be clear: despite its title, its language and its setting, The Shadow King is King Lear, Shakespeare’s, and all theatre’s, supreme drama.
In a remarkable achievement, Michael Kantor and Tom E. Lewis (who also plays the king) have stripped half its length, all but eight of its 21 characters (no sadistic Cornwall, no grasping Albany, no loyal Kent), changed the gender of one of them (Gloucester), presented a radically altered text in five indigenous languages as well as English, and delivered an always satisfying and sometimes transcendent version of the play.
As Djakapurra Munyarryun’s phenomenal, keening voice sings all the sorrow of tens of thousands of years, signed, date stamped and filed; as Frances Djulibing falls to the ground from the cliff her son imagines for her; as Tom E. Lewis dances, distracted, in the dust, the unsurpassable art that lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s greatest play, and this memorable, iconic, imagining of it, rises up from the red dirt and takes us in.


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: ONEFIVEZEROSEVEN

By Suzie Miller
Barking Gecko Theatre Company
Directed and designed by John Sheedy
Choreographer Danielle Micich
Featuring Harrison Elliott, Mohammed-Adel Berrached, Rikki Bremner, Toby Derrick, Yilin Kong, Jacinta Larcombe
The Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre
February 22 – March 1

Our political parties would do well to dig deep into Suzie Miller’s ONEFIVEZEROSEVEN for a glimpse into the lives and opinions of the next generation of voters and leaders.
As they did two years ago in Driving into Walls, Miller and Sheedy use young performers who are primarily dancers to represent these kids and their thoughts. They are also strong actors, and the result is more nuanced than its predecessor.
ONEFIVEZEROSEVEN is also far more optimistic and, I suspect, more representative of what’s happening for most young people.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: An Iliad

Homer’s Coat
for the Perth Festival
Written by Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson
Based on Homer’s Iliad, translated by Robert Fagles
Directed by Lisa Peterson
Performed by Denis O’Hare, with Brian Ellingsen
Sunken Gardens, UWA
Until February 26
(Albany Entertainment Centre February 28)

We begin with Homer, and nothing other than the Bible and Shakespeare has influenced us more. The poem of the uber-warrior Achilles, that begins “Goddess, sing the rage of Achilles, murderous, doomed, hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls”, is as bloody and propulsive as anything ever told. In it, for the first time, psychologically identifiable personalities emerge from the shade.
The American actor Denis O'Hare and his director friend Lisa Peterson have long harboured the idea of bringing The Iliad to the stage, and the result is an unmitigated triumph.
The character O’Hare creates is universal. He’s the man in the tattered coat who’s always looked at the world and seen it for what it was. He’s the miller and the little tramp, Falstaff and Quixote, written by Chaucer and Shakespeare, Voltaire and Cervantes, Nick Cave and Tom Waits.
And, of course, he’s the first of them all. He is Homer. 

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Krapp's Last Tape

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By Samuel Beckett

Directed and performed by Robert Wilson

His Majesty's Theatre

Krapp’s Last Tape, the short play by Samuel Beckett brought to His Majesty’s Theatre by the preeminent American theatre artist Robert Wilson for the Festival of Perth, is a work of forcible noise and long silences.

In one of those silences, the sound of someone sobbing could clearly be heard in the audience. I’m unable to say whether it was from high emotion engendered by Mr Wilson’s performance, or because she was desperate to escape from the theatre.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian