Reviews

This refined work requires a receptive open mind from its audience, who are ushered into a small reception room to receive a piquant glass of tea and choose an industrial or natural rock of their own, to then enter the small gallery of a performance space. 

In the intense, short but highly immersive forty-five minutes Zoe Scoglio engages, discovers, explores and plays with natural and constructed images of the forming, formations, and constructions of geological terrain.  Not a word is spoken and the audience is free to read into it what they will.

This sumptuous production is even stronger on its second outing in Sydney in less than four years.

It was created when Opera companies across Australia pooled resources to stage a new production of Aida with fresh choreography from Graeme Murphy.
The set was simple and clever. At the back of the stage are projected images, often along the theme of a pyramid. It was ideal for the love triangle at the centre of this story.

Opening with a bang … a canon … the ship came on stage, part of the side folded down and the pirates spilled onto stage. Very effective!

While I’m very familiar with The Pirates of Penzance, I haven’t previously encountered the junior version. Though the story line was unaltered, most songs had been cut down and some eliminated, trimming the running time to a little over an hour. Songs had been transposed into lower keys and there was little harmony.

However, the production was most entertaining.

The McNeil Project offers the chance to revisit a significant era of Australian Theatre History, in presenting two enlightening short plays that are set in prison cells of the 1970s.  These works are written by Jim McNeil who himself was a convicted prisoner.  

Production values are crisp and clean and the acting sincere and focused.  Both plays are well written, intriguing depictions of destabilized and volatile power relationships.