Reviews

Germinal is marvelous festival fare – an exceptional experience.  It is just the sort of show that stretches expectations and delivers the completely unpredicted in a totally unique way.  One gasps and laughs with surprise whilst being charmed by the whimsical nonsensicality of the experience.  And yet all the time the reasoning of the whole seems to be based on the perfectly rational.

Melbourne Writers’ Theatre continues to impress with another engaging series of monologues, The Melbourne Monologues. Like The St Kilda Stories it is also a series of six short stories that are directed with care and sensitivity by Elizabeth Walley.

Long before TV hits Wentworth and Orange is the New Black, there was Chicago, the John Kander, Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse Broadway Musical collaboration about women in prison for killing their lovers and husbands, their slimy lawyer and corrupt prison warder. Based on a 1926 play, it’s inspired by real criminals of the time, telling its satirical tale of celebrity criminals and the corruption of the legal system in the vaudeville style, used as a sort of Brechtian device

Rhinoceros, written in 1959 by Romanian / Frenchman Eugene Ionesco, illustrates how radical groups such as the Nazis, fascists or communists can come into being and sweep the people up into their beliefs. As a model, he has used the rhinoceros that at first seems strange and unattractive but lures most into the group. This is Theatre of the Absurd and heartBeast has staged it in a theatre that matched the play. In the Reservoir Theatre, at the bottom of four flights of stairs, the audience sat on three sides of a small square stage between four pillars.