Reviews

I can’t imagine how long it took Scottish playwright David Harrower to find the words that make the dialogue in this play so faultlessly natural and agonisingly harrowing. Nor can I imagine the amount of challenging research, discussion, emotion and pressure that must go into every production of this disturbing, unnerving, sad, yet strangely hopeful, piece of theatre.

We climb the very steep stairs up to the Explosives Factory playing space.  A big man in a bowler hat and snakeskin shoes greets us – in Spanish.  (A mystery never solved.)  He’s jolly but so big he’s a little intimidating.  He directs us to a table where we can have some soup and black bread.  If he likes the look of you, you may get a tiny nip of vodka...  La Traviata blasts out, filling the space.  Meanwhile, on a platform above the memorabilia littered stage, sit two men, motionless, facing away from each other.  When th

Andi Snelling’s creative process is to set her imagination loose so that she or it comes up with images, scenes, lines of dialogue or direct address in no particular order.  She films these inspirations just for herself, looks at them and asks, ‘Am I interested in this?  Would an audience be interested in this?

With this obscurest of Shakespeare’s dramas, Bell Shakespeare really takes flight in its newish harbourside flexible theatre space at Sydney’s Walsh Bay.