Tag Archives: reviews

Agony

11 Sep

Written and directed by Mariika Mehigan, this is a delightful historical comedy.

It took me a while to clock that it actually was a historical piece – though the costumes, and the presence on stage of a landline, should’ve been a giveaway. (I guess it’s a symptom of my obtuseness – and of something far more important, which I’ll discuss later.)

Agony is set in the 1970’s, at the height of second wave feminism and the sexual revolution. And high school student Bronnie has just had sex for the first time.

It was less than satisfying.

She seeks advice from Tanya, the “agony aunt” for teen magazine Honey. Problem is Tanya’s having problems of her own in the bedroom.

This raises the thorny question: Who of us has sufficient authority to hand down advice? How easily the handing down of advice slips into the laying down of law. Tanya is unlikely to abuse her position, but she’s aware that a young woman genuinely asking for guidance may well receive instead only instruction in the conventional, heteronormative, patriarchal narrative (which is like asking for bread and being given stones.)

The script is funny and cleverly structured, evocatively juxtaposing the stories of two women seeking their authentic selves.

Mehigan’s characterisations are superb, surprisingly and stimulatingly subtle for a 50 minute comedy. And as director she draws from her cast captivating performances (though occasionally there could be a little more attention to vocal projection.)

Laetitia Opie as teenage Bronnie is excellent, having a wonderful stage presence, and displaying top class comic skills as she delivers her advice-seeking monologues. Her repeated refrain, that her boyfriend is a bit of a prick, beautifully recalls the deliberate ambiguity of the world of Puberty Blues, where self-assertion and tragic resignation combine to create both humour and pathos.

Sophie Newby plays both Dean (the above mentioned prick) and Kay, Bronnie’s best friend. Newby’s performance is admirably versatile. Dean is stupidly and suitably self-centred, and Kay (gay though never explicitly labelled as such) is an inspiring model of quiet confidence and independence. 

Louie O’Carroll plays Tanya, the advice columnist, and gives an engaging presentation of that trickiest of positions: the dizzyingly, enervating dance of determination and doubt. She marvellously captures the poignancy of the play’s closing moment. 

Callum Wilson as Tanya’s boyfriend, Sean, offers a terrifically amusing portrait of evolving masculinity. In response to the women’s libbers (who clearly terrify him) he’s too nice to adopt the chauvinistic cliché of the dismissive swagger. Ironically, his supposed sensitivity only further muddies Tanya’s journey to authenticity.

I began by suggesting that I didn’t immediately recognise Agony as a historical piece. That’s a testament to its contemporary relevance. The tension inherent in sexuality is that while it’s deeply personal, it can’t be entirely private. Individual desires can only be fulfilled in the social world (even if we try to reduce that world to the supposed secrecy of the bedroom.) The tensions navigated by the characters in Agony are still faced by young people today. And to be reminded of what happened in the 60s and 70s, when activists strove to bring into the open these tensions, and to have sexual diversity honestly acknowledged, is a glorious gift of hope.

Paul Gilchrist

Agony by Mariika Mehigan

at the Emerging Artist Sharehouse (Erskineville Town Hall)

as part of the Sydney Fringe, until 13 Sept

sydneyfringe.com

Image supplied.

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Emerald City

24 Jul

David Williamson is a legend of Australian theatre and Emerald City is one of his best known plays.

First produced in 1987, it tells the story of screenwriter Colin who brings his family to Sydney to further his career.

True to traditional satirical structure, the play is constructed from dichotomies: Sydney versus Melbourne; the Eastern Suburbs versus the Rest of our Sprawling Metropolis; Private Schools versus State Schools; America versus Australia; Entertainment versus Art; Ambition versus Acceptance; Hypocrisy versus Integrity.

Each of these dichotomies evoke the more fundamental binary division of Evil versus Good.

The game we’re asked to play is to consider whether these dichotomies are overly simplistic or just plain false. We’re encouraged to do this by intriguing character arcs and piercingly funny one-liners.

As a screenwriter, Colin gives the advice that something always has to be at stake – but it’s not reasonable to assume a theatre reviewer will relate to a story in which characters seek glamour and success. (Some might even suggest that ambition is not a particularly interesting subject – unless it leads you to kill the king of Scotland and afterwards deliver some hauntingly desperate soliloquys.)

Inoculated by hard experience, two-bit reviewers might be immune to the siren song of Success – but that immunity is hardly universal. Many conversations about Art do sound like demarcation disputes, or performance reviews, or quality control panels, or price negotiations. But only one conversation is vital. And it happens in the desert, when the artist battles with the devil – alone, naked and true – and in that battle forfeits her ego to win her soul. And tired but free, she returns to the city, and scratched in the dirt if necessary, she offers a vision of the kingdom of heaven.

This play attempts no such a vision – but it does effectively make the primrose path to hell appear a little less rosy.  

Mark Kilmurry’s production is a fascinating opportunity to observe the challenges of the actors’ craft. Satirical roles can be surprisingly tricky, especially when the characters themselves are granted an aptitude for mocking comic observation. It’s fun to watch Tom O’Sullivan as Colin and Rachel Gordon as his wife Kate navigate the slippery duality of being both declaimers of foibles and figures of ridicule themselves. Juxtaposed with these two is the more straightforward characterisation of the hustler Mike, who is transparently duplicitous, a gloriously self-seeking philistine – and Matt Minto embraces the role with a wonderful physicality and a mirth-inducing energy.

Paul Gilchrist

Emerald City by David Williamson

At Ensemble Theatre until 23 Aug

ensemble.com.au

Image by Phil Erbacher

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Mr Red Light

11 Jul

A group of innocent people are held hostage for an hour and a half, which is coincidentally also the story being told on stage. (Thus would I seriously begin my review, if I were to accept my role in the grand tradition of theatre criticism, a role that posits my superiority to the storytellers. But I won’t – for reasons that will become apparent by the end of my response.)

After a failed attempted to rob a bank, Mr Red Light ends up in the Joker’s Pies store next door.

Despite a gun being waved around for the entirety of the show, the vision is comic and the key word wacky. There’s fun wordplay, set-based visual gags and very committed slapstick humour.

Written by Carl Bland (with Peter Bland and Peta Rutter) the play is absurdist or surrealist in intent, with the incredible scenario serving to invite thought about the human condition.

Dramatists love the trick of offering their characters no possibility of escape (and audiences go along with it because – as I’ve suggested – it often mirrors their own experience of being in a theatre.) But it’s a trick that demands careful consideration of the physicality of the performances; it’s inevitable that close proximity will have to reflect both intimacy and antipathy, and in so far as this genre is a distant cousin of naturalism, there’s enormous pressure to get the pacing right to make this all appear, if not believable, then at least somehow related to reality.

This production is certainly a giggle generator, but it suffers from an imprecision in the physical humour which is matched by a lack of rigour in the linguistic performances. And though the set by Andrew Foster impresses, some of the visual puns seem gratuitous. 

The plot plays out in real time, but texture is created by breaks into flashbacks, imagined scenarios and surprising perspectives.

This suggests the aspect of the human condition being explored is our ability to tell stories. Stories are shelter one character says. But not when they’re merely ever-repeated internal monologues: that sort of unexamined private narrative only prevents us experiencing Life’s fullness. Two of the characters have succumbed to the habit of telling themselves the story that they’re perpetually unlucky. (Always hitting red lights.) Another tells herself a constant narrative of guilt. We are storytelling creatures, but it’s only when we share those stories that their magic becomes apparent. It’s only when we sit around the fire and share with others the journey we’ve survived that stories perform their miracle: the transformation of disparate individuals into a close-knit community.

The unlikely conclusion of this piece is a hyperbolic assertion of this magical ability of stories. And though I feel this production struggles to cast that spell, it’s indubitably a joyful celebration of why theatre matters.

Paul Gilchrist

Mr Red Light by Carl Bland (with Peter Bland and Peta Rutter)

Presented by Nightsong

At Riverside Theatres until 12 July

riversideparramatta.com.au

Image supplied

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Primary Trust

26 Jun

To misquote Gandhi, We’re all children of God, it’s just that some of us are more childlike than others.

Kenneth is such a person.

Gentle, hesitant, uncertain, he lives a plain life and keeps to himself. He works at a second-hand bookstore. Every night he goes to Wally’s and drinks Mai Tais with his only friend, Bert. It’s difficult for Kenneth to imagine Life without Bert – and that’s curious, because Life doesn’t give many of us a Bert after the age of four. (Bert is the only character in Eboni Booth’s Pulitzer Prize winning play who transcends – in his own wondrous way – the inescapable doubts and wistful regrets of this sublunary world.)

When Kenneth’s bookshop is sold, he’s worried how he’ll find employment. (He got his first job only thanks to a social worker.) At the advice of Corrina from Wally’s, he applies for a position at a bank with the evocative name Primary Trust. According to Kenneth, the manager employs him because he reminds him of his brain-damaged brother.

As his friendship with Corrina develops, his special relationship with Bert changes, in a way that’s confronting (for Kenneth) but beautiful and hopeful.

The supreme importance of relationships like friendship is emphasised by an exquisitely simple speech by Corrina about her best friend, Denise. Corrina loves Denise. We don’t know why: in fact, we know virtually nothing about the briefly mentioned and never seen Denise – except that she doesn’t look after her cat as well as she might. But sometimes, when Corrina thinks about Denise, she cries. Perhaps this sounds sentimental? I think Corrina is just being honest, and being honest with Kenneth is life-changing. It’s this sort of openness that helps him find the connections he so desperately needs.

Primary Trust is an absolutely delightful comedy, informed by a sense of small town dagginess reminiscent of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. (The set, by James Browne, with a back wall of many coloured doors emphasises this sense of the parochial presented playfully.) But unlike Wilder’s play, this story is one character’s (Kenneth’s), and the view from eternity that warmly infuses the conclusion of Our Town is absent, replaced by the vision, courageous and true, that the only heaven there is we must find here, amongst the struggling souls who surround us.

Except for one alluded-to-but-not-expanded-upon instance of racial injustice, the world around Kenneth is not malignant, only forgetful. (Or a little too complaisant: The sky is blue, what can you do?) But a little reaching out goes a long way.

Yes, it’s an exploration of trauma, highlighting the humanity of those who suffer – but what the play primarily offers is not a portrait of pain but rather models of kindness (the consistent, persistent type that engenders trust.)

Directed by Darren Yap, performances are gorgeously engaging. As Kenneth, Albert Mwangi is superb, both immensely likeable and poignantly pathetic. With a compassionate charisma, Charles Allen plays Bert, wonderfully portraying the perpetual patience and positivity of the best friend of our dreams. Angela Mahlatjie’s Corrina is magnificent: honest and humble yet hopeful; softly unassuming and utterly soul-expanding. And she and Peter Kowitz do some hilarious doubling, with Kowitz’s bank manager true comic gold. Booth’s script –which captures the wavering richness of real speech – calls for virtuoso vocal work, and the cast delivers (aided, no doubt, by the remarkable skills of dialect coach Linda Nicholls-Gidley.)

This Ensemble production is a glorious invitation to laugh, and an irresistible reminder of our shared humanity.

Paul Gilchrist

Primary Trust by Eboni Booth

at Ensemble until 12 July

ensemble.com.au

Image by Prudence Upton

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Heaven

19 May

This is a beautiful play, beautifully presented.

Written by Irish writer Eugene O’Brien, it tells the story of a middle-aged couple at a crisis point, and it does so with humour and insight.

Kate Gaul’s direction is wonderfully simple, unaffected in a way that allows the brilliance of the writing and performance to shine.

The piece is constructed from two intertwining monologues. Husband and wife Mal and Mairead attend a family wedding. The couple seem to get on well, but they’re never shown speaking to each other because each is in the process of exploring something that will challenge their relationship. Fitting the setting, that challenge is sexual.

Mairead has met an old flame, the man with whom, in her twenties, she had the best sex of her life. Mal is confronting his repressed homosexual desires.

The title? Heaven? Do they both seek a joy that will utterly transcend their merely comfortable relationship? Have both become aware that Eternity fast approaches, with its mysterious, unsatisfying promise of either oblivion or pleasures of a less certain nature?  

In contrast to the metaphysical connotations of the title, both characters use very physical metaphors to express their needs and doubts, underlining that they’re far from finished with this plane of existence. She asks is this where my 50 years has lead? He wonders whether he has the courage to enter the world below, the lower dimension.

Because of my peculiar (and un-Australian) penchant for digging into metaphor, I should make clear that the play is not in any way religious (except what it has in common with all serious philosophies: an awareness of the tension between our inner lives and our outward relationships.)

This is, however, modern Ireland, and the hand of Catholicism is still heavy. Mairead tells of going to England for an abortion. Mal’s sexual fantasies are couched in the language of his desire for Jesus, effectively suggesting the complexity of his emotional situation, its guilt and its passion.

As the couple, Lucy Miller and Noel Hodda are absolutely superb.

Miller’s Mairead is gloriously tough. She doesn’t edit her speech. She’s a proud playground bully. She’s utterly disdainful of her daughter’s choice of partner. Reflecting on the death of her abusive father, she hisses that cancer sometimes takes the right ones. She’s deeply sensual and unafraid to fulfill her needs. Yet, she never speaks a word against Mal. It’s a magnificently rounded portrait, strength sparring with uncertainty, delivered with captivating power.

Hodda’s Mal is gentler, softer – desirous of the direction Mairead gives his life. Hodda plays the humour of the-dag-who-dares with consummate skill, but also marvellously portrays the internal battle between desire and doubt.

It’s a temptation with a production like this to be so taken by the skill of the makers that you forget the meaning, that (to mangle Yeats) you fall in love with the dancers, and forget the dance. But this production – an exploration of the tension between our inner and outer worlds, epitomised in its presentation of a marriage under threat – achieves the perfect marriage between artistry and Art.   

Paul Gilchrist

Heaven by Eugene O’Brien

Presented by Bitchen Wolf

At the Loading Dock Qtopia, until May 31

qtopiasydney.com.au

Image by Alex Vaughan

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Various Characters

9 May

I’m not a fan of Australian theatre’s obsession with teenagers. For me, it suggests a tiresome childishness in our intellectual outlook, a mawkish nostalgia that resists adulthood, a fear of responsibility being allowed to trump the embracing of opportunity.

But I also know that childhood leaves no survivors*, and if you want to explore vulnerability (whatever its cause), the teenage years are a very good place to start.

And that’s what Šime Knežević does in his beautifully written Various Characters, directed with skilful subtlety by Victor Kalka.

Set in Western Sydney in the early 2000’s, most of the characters are teenagers.

Nina (Georgia Da Silva) has lost her mother and is living unhappily with her aunt. She desperately wants to visit her sister in Melbourne, but she doesn’t have the cash. The solution? Sell the dog. But she can’t sell it to just anyone; it has to go to a good home. Both touching and funny, this initial scene operates as a perfect symbolic introduction to the wider problems the characters face: insecurities that threaten to degenerate into desperation.

Knežević captures the teenage voice brilliantly (though some of the actors go a little overboard in their embodiment of youthful apprehension and would benefit from greater vocal projection.)

Da Silva, Maliyan Blair, Nashy MZ and Tate Wilkinson-Alexander as the teenagers capture the age’s enthusiasms and doubts, and give performances that are both amusing and affecting.

The two adult characters seem only a small step away from children, a powerful suggestion that the challenges the teenagers experience are ubiquitous. After all, this is ethnically diverse Western Sydney under a conservative government (and, some would say, a perpetually conservative mono-culture.)

Dog-purchaser and police officer Raoul expresses the confusion of a man who has somewhat unwillingly conformed to the hegemony. Tony Goh’s portrait is simultaneously comic and pathos-inducing.

Greta has lost her job, but there’s a market at Bigge Park and she hopes to kickstart a business venture with a stall selling Croatian food. She was born in Australia, but is proud of her heritage and dreams of a community open-hearted enough to embrace and celebrate diversity. Kate Bookallil as Greta gives a splendid performance, evoking magnificently the character’s fierce determination and quiet despair.

Paul Gilchrist

Various Characters by Šime Knežević

Presented by Plus Minus Productions, in association with Virginia Plain and Flight Path Theatre

At Flight Path until 17 May

flightpaththeatre.org

Image by Robert Miniter

*I haven’t been able to find the source of this quote.

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Mummy, I’m Scared

11 Apr

This is a work of craziness and true comic commitment.

Set in the late nineteenth century, it tells the story of a family of women intent on summoning a spirit via a séance.

I call it a story – and for the show’s 50 minute duration, the plot works very effectively – but it’s really just a fast moving vehicle for some humorous hijinks.

It’s a three hander, written by Fia Morrison, and performed by Morrison, and her co-collaborators Alison Cooper and Georgia Condon.

There’s a lot of doubling, and this adds to the show’s enormous verve.

All three performers display great physicality, and Morrison herself excels in the type of magical facial expression that’s gloriously hyperbolic and glowing with mischievous energy. (Rather than the Theatre of Authenticity, this is the Theatre of Audacity, inviting an audience response of I can’t believe you’re actually doing that!)

All three performers have thrilling, distinctive vocal styles, and use these to mine and shine the comic nuance of Morrison’s lively script. Cooper is particularly adept at the throwaway gag. (Admittedly, at times, I lost lines from all three actors, but in a show like this, that’s always a risk courted for the sake of sheer exuberance.)

The historical setting makes sense of the focus on seances and the supernatural. The world weariness of fin de siècle society, with its rejection of traditional religion and its growing awareness of the inadequacy of any substitutes, encouraged the most audacious of spiritual experiments.

But the setting also facilitates key aspects of the show’s humour and impact.

Somewhere in the last hundred years or so, the acting fraternity has developed a way of portraying (faux) late Victorian and Edwardian historical characters, one epitomised by a thoroughly declarative vocal style. (It’s one of the styles employed in this production.) Where does it come from? Perhaps it’s our shared response to amateur theatre’s penchant for quaint old drawing-room dramas. Or perhaps, more broadly, it’s modernism’s response to the era that preceded it. Virginia Woolf famously quipped “on or about December 1910, human character changed”. But from wherever the trope derives, the declarative style we routinely give to historical characters is a delightful and deliberate denial of their inner life. And in this consciously comic erasure of psychological complexity, the performers themselves gift us a playfully subversive reminder of genuine human vitality.

Paul Gilchrist

Mummy, I’m Scared by Fia Morrison

Morrison was mentored by Mish Grigor, and the piece is presented as part of ArtsLab: Reverb, a program from Shopfront Arts that showcases the talents of emerging artists.

Until 12 April at Shopfront

shopfront.org.au (for tix and full program)

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The Lotto Line

3 Apr

This is seriously committed crazy.

Written by John Tsakiris, and directed by Megan Heferen and Tsakiris, The Lotto Line presents five people waiting in line to buy tickets in a lottery. They don’t seem interested in winning. Once the outlet closes, they wait for it to reopen. Time stops.

Absurdist theatre is a funny form. Some would say that it doesn’t so much reflect Life’s meaninglessness as actively add to it.

And it’s a brave team who presents a play in which Time stops. Of course, theatre reviewers are never catty or petty, but if they were, it’d be one hell of a temptation.

And perhaps only a youthful team could produce a play in which the halting of Time – the having to Wait – is presented as a fundamental human experience.

That’s what absurdism does: in convention-shattering ways, it tries to express something about the human condition. It’s transgressive spirit means that it especially values innovation (in fact, some commentators might suggest that the only thing absurdist plays have in common is that they’re all longer than they need to be.)

To suggest a formula, absurdism is where the Theatre of Audacity (I can’t believe you’re doing that!) combines with the Theatre of Authenticity (I totally believe what you’re doing.) It’s an absolutely explosive mixture.

I’ve already suggested I struggled to connect with the authenticity of this piece, but neither my personal limitations nor my impatience with decoding should get in the way of discussing its audacity.

In terms of physicality, performances are super tight. The choreographed movement that suggests these characters are slaves to routine is wonderfully executed. Jess Spies as the Lotto Master is a terrific counterpoint, engendering a swaggering superiority.

When those who Wait individualise themselves from the group, there’s more skilled comedy. Larissa Turton’s gruff crazy cat lady is splendid. Holly Mazzola’s clever, particular and prematurely middle-aged woman is a masterclass in focus. Jonathon Nicola’s petulant pedant is engaging fun. As Mr Horner, James Thomasson balances well the eternal battle between frustration and hope. Megan Heferen’s imperious, supercilious Ms Atkins drives much of the piece.

On occasions, there could be more care with vocal work. There were moments when I was afraid I’d be reduced to recommending this show to only enthusiasts of screeching. And, unfortunately, some of the mischievous linguistic humour was lost in delivery. But there’s a neat trick where characters swap vocal styles, and Turton and Mazzola pull it off with aplomb.

The Lotto Line is a playful puzzle, a nonsensical 90 minutes, an invitation to laugh.

Paul Gilchrist

The Lotto Line by John Tsakiris

Presented by Studio Five Productions

At Flow Studios until 12 April

events.humanitix.com/the-lotto-line

Image by Patrick Phillips

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The Glass Menagerie

27 Mar

This is a beautiful production of a superb play.

The Glass Menagerie was first produced in 1944, and it launched Tennessee Williams’ career.

This slightly amended version is a poignant meditation on dreams, memory, and regrets.

Blazey Best is absolutely magnificent as Amanda, matriarch of a small house, evoking both laughter and pathos as she presents the fading southern belle, all attitudes, airs and … anguish. Once, in a single afternoon, she had seventeen gentleman callers. Now she worries for her daughter Laura, who has no gentleman callers at all.

Laura has a slight defect in her leg, but suffers more from her crippling shyness. Her life has reduced to playing records and tending her ornamental glass menagerie. Bridie McKim is brilliant as Laura, portraying perfectly her painfully overwhelming self-consciousness, while still finding those heartrending moments where hope glimmers through.

Tom, Laura’s brother, chafes under the responsibility he has to his fatherless family, and can barely endure his banal warehouse job. He also narrates the play, stepping out of the action to muse on the distance between mundanity and magic, between the average life and the adventurous one. Tom is a partially autobiographical creation; he dreams of being a writer, and his family situation is not unlike that of Williams’ youth. Danny Ball is mesmerising in the role, capturing both Tom’s energy and his desperation.

Tom also rankles under his mother’s insistence he find his sister a beau. The tyranny of women snaps back Amanda, with scathing satire.

He brings Jim to dinner.

Tom Rodgers offers a splendid portrait of Jim, bubbling and brimming with naïve enthusiasm. His scene with McKim’s fraught Laura is dramatic gold.

Liesel Badorrek’s production is a wonderful opportunity to see a classic of the American stage.

Paul Gilchrist

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

at Ensemble Theatre until 26 April

ensemble.com.au

Image by Prudence Upton

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Iphigenia in Splott

14 Mar

Apparently, this is based on an “enduring” Greek myth, but whatever that myth is, it hasn’t endured in my myopic world.

But, unquestionably, Iphigenia in Splott is one of those gritty, working class British plays that Australian theatre loves. Effie has a drinking problem. And she’s aggressive, in the way those who have substance abuse problems, or are marginalised, sometimes are. She tells us about a couple of months in her life, and challenges us to see her as a someone of value.

In this colossal monologue, directed beautifully by Lucy Clements, Meg Clarke plays Effie, and does so wonderfully, finding the humour and sharing the heartbreak.

On the most obvious level, the piece is a powerful plea for empathy, a passionate and engaging reminder that the person you might want to avoid on the street is a person all the same. Effie acknowledges that this can be difficult, joking that she’s sometimes herself uncertain about her boyfriend’s claim to full humanity.

The piece also floats the idea that Effie’s problems are societal, that she is somehow representative of those who have suffered because of political mismanagement.

Written by Welsh playwright Gary Owen, it was first produced in Britain a decade ago, and perhaps it’s outgrown its origin. This is not a criticism of the piece per se, but a reminder, that like Greek myths, stories belong to their context. Effie talks a lot about “cuts”, and I can guess at the sort of policies she means, but the piece doesn’t give the background to assess whether these “cuts” are the result of hardhearted corruption, or were simply unavoidable. No doubt, it would’ve been far clearer to an audience in Cardiff in 2015.

Ultimately, Effie gives the impression that someone else is to blame for her situation, and that’s why she’s angry. But we’re also shown her making poor choices, and she herself criticises her boyfriend for complaining about all the shit on the street, turds he hasn’t picked up after his own dog.

It can be a mistake with a piece like this to assume the sole character is a truth-teller, some sort of Greek oracle. Drama works on the dynamic that no character has such a monopoly; that’s the form’s deeply humane vision. Only in the shallowest of drama is one character wholly right and the others wholly wrong. Monologue is no different. We’re not being asked if what Effie says is the Truth, but why it might be the Truth for her – that’s how we grant her the personhood she demands, and so deserves. (And, no, I’m not saying we don’t have a responsibility to help the marginalised, but am suggesting we shouldn’t confuse political engagement with simplistic readings of the dramatic form.)

Some audience members might thrill to Effie’s final dark, threatening statement, but it’s not some clarion call to action, but rather an expression of who she is, in all her pained bewilderment. If she is an oracle at all, she is in the way oracles enduringly are: their predictions will come to pass, but in ways far more disturbing and tragic than we can imagine.

Paul Gilchrist

Iphigenia in Splott by Gary Owen

Presented by New Ghosts Theatre Company

At Old Fitz Theatre until 22 March

http://oldfitztheatre.com.au

Image by Phil Erbacher   

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