Reviews

Fresh, young, innovative dramatic work presented by National Youth Theatre Company (NYTC), headed up by actor/director Lindsay Farris, who also possesses a solid dollop of creative entrepreneurialism, who has turned a vision and mission into a reality in only three months.

There’s a stunning moment in Ms Jacobs’ adventurous, counter-intuitive direction of Mr Crimp’s edgy, tense, efficient if unremarkable elegy to inner-urban, fringe-dwelling fatalism for the Red Stitch Actors Theatre. When Clair (the captivating Fiona Macleod) has returned from a conference in Lisbon, she has gone straight upstairs to bed. A bright red alarm clock rings incessantly, bringing her downstairs to resume her tranquillised existence of manufactured empathy with her world and, particularly, her husband Christopher (a fearless Dion Mills).

Who can blame Opera Australia for squeezing every potential dollar from their Gilbert & Sullivan repertoire? The bookings are always big, the audiences are always loudly appreciative and the famed comic operas can fund more eclectic, difficult, less obviously commercial productions like this year’s Bliss and next year’s Of Mice and Men.

This is an interesting play about the relationship between and indigenous man and a white girl, set at a time when the world’s social order has seemingly collapsed. Performed in the Cairns Botanical Gardens, the play blended smoothly with the surroundings. Co-author Warren Clements had a strong presence as Will, the indigenous man whose life was so immersed in his culture, while Liza Parker, as Aphra, gave a convincing performance as woman whose social parameters had disintegrated.