Reviews

Director Simon Stone’s run of excellence last year climaxed this month with four Sydney Theatre Awards for his Belvoir production of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.

Actually, Stone threw Ibsen’s words to the wind, completely rewriting the play into contemporary life and staging it in a glass box with miked actors.

His astonishing take on Seneca’s Thyestes – co-written earlier with the three actors from The Hayloft Project for a Melbourne premiere in 2010 – goes even further in discarding the original.

When the chorus as the proud people of Peking entered the stage, they were so jam-packed you felt if someone pushed in the wrong direction they might all tumble into the orchestra pit.

We know China is crowded, so it was apt that the stage was as well.

More than sixty members of the children’s and adult chorus swayed, marched and mocked in bloodthirsty time to the music.

The Doll is undeniably one of our best and most enduring plays. This Belvoir production sets a new standard against which future productions will be compared.

Director, Neil Armfield and his inspired cast explore its relevance to modern lifestyles. Starry-eyed Olive tells Pearl that she prefers her annual five months of love, joy and devotion, followed by seven months of warm memories and anticipation of the boys’ return, to the drab routine of modern marriage. A contentious attitude in the fifties; not so confronting these days.

It’s spooky, has cute girls and guys and lots of laughs. This production of Stage Fright! is nicely tuned for the 7 to 13 year old target market.

For the uninitiated, Paul Jennings’ books have lashings of teenage angst about that first kiss, haunted houses and the odd peculiar maths teacher.

This adaptation dips into a number of his novels, and although it does not quite make sense as a complete narrative it works well as a best of night.