Reviews

This play is frankly a treasure: a great yarn of psychological medicine, medical science, and old family hurts; revealing, touching, and surprisingly funny.  (The title refers to intergenerational influence, via the discovery by French scientist Jacques Benveniste—and later by dozens of replicating experimenters—that the high-“potency” solutions that homoeopathic medicine commonly uses retain detectable physical and medicinal properties of their absent solutes.)

Malthouse’s production of Lorca’s Blood Wedding sees language as no barrier to understanding a narrative of overwhelming desire and crushing grief, and potentially, injects heat and passion into the bleak, cold and wet Melbourne mid-winter.

If you really want to see strong, powerful acting, then Red Stitch Actors Theatre will not disappoint. The Pride is a gripping tale of two gay men, and a woman, who are living in very different eras: the 1950s and the present day. Playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell first shows us two men who are drawn to each other but cannot be together because of society’s rules. Then the play takes an imaginative, and startling, turn into the 00s, where homosexuality is a lot more accepted, even celebrated. But that freedom comes at a price, too.

Since its resounding success in London and New York, this play has become the new ‘pop’ comedy for community theatre. It has much appeal. To begin with, for the audience, the story is well known through book, the film and television make-overs – and the dashing but beleaguered Richard Hannay was, after all, the very first of the British super spies.  But for theatre practitioners, the play has even more altruistic appeal.