Reviews

Have you ever wanted to kill someone?

This unsettling question sets the tone for a soul-searching analysis that leaves audiences questioning their own values and the nature of human darkness. Tonsils + Tweezers, by playwright Will O’Mahony, blends sharp humour with emotional depth in a surreal black-comedy about friendship and the lingering impact of the past.

The Dress is a compelling 90-minute two-hander that remains something of a hidden gem in Melbourne’s west.

What is the enduring appeal of this 1897 story so that it is told and retold?  A brilliant man – a wit, brimming with confidence, a poet eloquent in voice and writing, a fighter, a swordsman, hated by the jealous, admired by his friends – but inside he feels himself to be too ridiculously ugly to declare his love to the woman he adores.  And so, he makes love vicariously: on behalf of his rival, Christian.   it hurts but he is too much in love with Roxanne and with words to stop.  Is this a secret many men nurture in their hearts?

Elbow Room’s Saints is hugely dense and ambitious.  Set in a fractious England in 1654, a time when the monarchy has fallen, and the country is in violent chaos.  People yearn for certainty but reject the old order.  Who will be on the ‘right side of History?’  England is or was supposedly ruled by the failed ‘Parliament of Saints’, and the play depicts contending forces and communities, now largely subsumed by History: naïve anti-authoritarian but self-sufficient groups and sects that flower until swept away.  Playwright