Drama and its core principles are to be found in theatres while the real world goes on outside, right? Wrong. And recent events bear this out. Dramaturgy is the art of managing events in time for the benefit…
The performance space in which Wesley Enoch’s play Black Diggers is being performed at the Brisbane Festival is a large black box. It features a raised stage in the middle which proves versatile for battlegrounds…
The ghost, in this autumn’s Royal Exchange Theatre production of Hamlet, is in the light bulbs. Hung over the stage, they flicker and hum as they mark Old Hamlet’s movements. They also set the scene for…
Traditionally soap is made by rendering down lard. But in this tight show, Soap, playing at the Brisbane Festival, there isn’t an ounce of fat to be seen. The pace is fast and the bodies are lean. It’s…
Here are two opposing definitions of rape. Rape: a violent, criminal act almost exclusively inflicted on women and girls by men. An ordeal of which the outcome is devastating, shaming, psychologically…
The September 4 live transmission of Euripides’ Medea will have brought an ancient Greek tragedy to thousands of viewers. And it’s quite a play. Spurned by her husband Jason, Medea commits unspeakable…
Peta Brady’s Ugly Mugs, which I saw in Sydney last week, opens with a gurney being wheeled onto the stage – on it, a sex worker who has died at the hands of a client and who, like the phoenix tattooed…
Alex Oates’ debut Fringe play traces the journey of 19-year-old Geordie lad Bruce, as he begins dealing cocaine via the illicit online marketplace Silk Road. Under the guise of a coming of age drama, the…
Two cancelled shows at the Edinburgh fringe, a theatre in London refusing to host a film festival while it was partly funded by the Israeli Embassy and now, on the other side of the spectrum, Belfast City…
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe has, over the years, developed a reputation as a hotbed for alternative, edgy, and controversial performance. Graham Main’s Blood Orange is no exception. The play is a seething…
Around 89,960. That’s the number of meals we can expect to eat if we live to the age of 82. Take an average of men and women’s life expectancies (79.9 + 84.3 ÷ 2), x 3 meals a day, x 365 days a year…
My Night with Reg, Kevin Elyot’s 1994 play, has returned to the London stage, poignantly only a few weeks after the death of the playwright. Set in London’s gay community in the 1980s, the play follows…
“I’m a poet. That’s what makes me interesting.” So begins the autobiography of Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose futuristic militarisation of poetic verse proved even more revolutionary than the Bolsheviks’ seizure…
Sydney Theatre Company’s new production of Macbeth may draw attention for its star, Hugo Weaving, but the most powerful agent of this production is the theatrical space. Director Kip Williams has inverted…
A new production of Medea recently opened at London’s National Theatre to critical acclaim. This is a Medea definitively set in the modern era: the production opens with two little boys watching television…
I don’t really go in for creative mash-ups. You know: Alien vs. Predator, or the films where Superman goes head to head with six baddies from different comics, only helped by Spider Man and Wonder Woman…
Theatre of dreams, theatre of play opened this week at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), a new exhibit giving a fascinating glimpse into one of Japan’s great theatrical traditions nō (Noh) through…
Bell Shakespeare’s new production of William Shakespeare’s Henry V – which opened in Canberra on June 14 – interrogates the complexities of war through a unique framing device: its scenes are played out…
Since 2006, I have led the Shakespeare Prison Project, an initiative by the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble, in high-security men’s prisons. Three or four artists work with 12 to 20 prisoners over three…
Last year in Australian theatre a rare event took place: a sector-wide debate about the role of classic adaptations in the national repertoire. But the discussion had darker resonances and was clearly…