Reviews

‘Esteemed members of the academy,’ opens the solo performer in Colin Teevan’s Kafka’s Monkey (adapted from Franz Kafka’s short story A Report to an Academy), ‘You’ve done me the great honour of inviting me to give an account of my former life … as an ape.’ So begins the peculiar story of ‘Red Peter’, an ape captured violently in Africa and brought by sea to England, where he sees ‘no way out’ but to abandon his true nature and adopt the habits of humans – a species he abhors – in ord

Louisa May Alcott was both a woman of her time and a woman before her time! A writer, teacher, nurse, abolitionist, feminist, believer in women’s suffrage, as well as a caring, supportive daughter, sister and aunt. Reading a summary of her life is like combining the female characters from Dickens and the Brontes and transporting them across the sea to a little town in nineteenth century America.

Storked is, as the program blurb says, ‘a series of vignettes’ – here, that is, short scenes and sketches about aspects of female physiological and psychological experience – with the exception of the horrible pain of endometriosis – they are unignorable and inevitable.  Not for nothing was menstruation alone called ‘the curse’ but here - as it seems to me - playwright Myf Hocking extends the concept of ‘curse’ by declaring in their program notes that Storked is about ‘monogamy, pregnancy, parenting, and the

There’s a particular brand of rage that lives just beneath the surface of being a woman in the 21st century. MO Theatre’s Pramkicker, written by Sadie Hasler, grabs that simmering fury by the almond mum ponytail and drags it out into the open—with hilarious, devastating, and unflinching effect. Equal parts gut punch and belly laugh, this blisteringly funny two-hander doesn’t hold anything back, and frankly, thank Goddess for that!