Reviews

The woman on stage is quiet, dignified, looking healthy, and sounding articulate and rational. At 55, Rachel Gärtner is too young to be describing her life as being over, but since her husband’s death, she no longer wishes to live. She is here before the German Ethics Council, pleading her case that she be prescribed phenobarbital with which she will bring about her own death. This play allows the audience to play God, as it were, by casting a vote on whether the state should assist Ms Gärtner to, prematurely but peacefully, die.

TGSS’s production of Diana Son’s Stop Kiss can be summed up as being nothing short of a triumph. Diana Son’s tender emotionally charged script finds a fresh and confident voice under the direction of Josh Manoa, whose directorial debut signals an exciting new talent in the Adelaide theatre scene. Manoa’s vision is compassionate, and deeply attuned to the play’s beating heart, guiding the production with emotional input that reaches beyond the stage.

First broadcast in 1952 as a BBC television event, Dial M For Murder by Frederick Knott found fame two years later as the near-perfect Alfred Hitchcock thriller, with Grace Kelly and Ray Milland as the wealthy couple involved in deadly doings in their posh London flat. Much adapted, this latest version by American thriller writer Jeffrey Hatcher comes as the Xmas Show at the Ensemble Theatre, so much will be riding on it.

The currently homeless Irish Theatre Players slipped into Old Mill Theatre for a beautifully realised production that left its audience smiling.

Shush might almost be the Irish Steel Magnolias, set in a single room, with a cast of women of varying ages, long term familiarity and the same sense of laughter through tears. Irish accents were superbly employed and stood up to the scrutiny of the Irish in the audience.