Reviews

This irreverent, funny and frenetic version of Pride and Prejudice features five actors playing more than twenty-five characters in a 90-minute party of a play that might make your Year 12 English teacher faint. Playing cabaret style Downstairs at the Maj, the audience and one cast member are invited to get sozzled, and audience get involved in a raucous and wild journey back to 1800s Pemberley.

In this quite brilliant reinterpretation, Chaika Theatre’s production completely reframes the morality of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, highlighting how Shakespeare’s language and depiction of political motivation transcends his intention. Director Caitlin Baker uses potent modern symbols extremely sparingly, just enough to suggest a different interpretation but not so much as to completely overwhelm. By placing Caesar in Trump’s trademark blue suit and red tie, Baker suggests Caesar is in a position a little like Trump.

A clue to Martin Crimp’s post-structuralist, no-action Absurdist play is that he finished Fewer Emergencies the day before the 9/11 attack in 2001. Crimp arguably shows how this huge fissure continued to shatter our world, our communities and our lives.

Staged by The Company at the Old Fitz, the play is really three separate but related playlets. Three nameless characters each tell a confronting story as the other two chip in with questions and suggestions, describing the reality they all watch in the middle distance … yet also seeming to create it.

Harold Pinter’s renowned 1978 classic reveals the lies and infidelity swirling between a woman, her publisher husband, and his best friend, a literary agent.  Pinter famously tells the story backwards, beginning when the two now former lovers have a polite reunion and ending when the affair began a decade earlier. 

This rear vision makes the lies in both their marriages all the clearer - whether mistaking petty details or white fibs or the gross, fundamental lies.  We focus on these sliding truths, not any chronological melodrama.