Cameron Woodhead August 7, 2019 — 2.11pm ★★★★ A cabaret set amid the horror and deprivation of Jewish ghettoes in World War II? You’d have to be crazy. Totally meshugah. Yet Galit Klas has created one of the most…
Wednesday, 24 July 2019 Lisa Gorton ★★★★ In this intelligent and unusual play, director Peta Hanrahan arranges Virginia Woolf’s great essay A Room of One’s Own into an hour-long play for four voices. Curiously, perhaps, it works so well as…
Saturday 8 June Alison Croggon Love and Shit, an exhilarating double bill by Patricia Cornelius at fortyfivedownstairs, expose the uncomfortable realities of Australia’s underclass. In doing so, these plays remind us how vital theatre can be. Sometimes, I really do…
Louris van de Geer’s Triumph at fortyfivedownstairs full of ideas Chris Boyd The Australian February 22, 2016 A small group of men and women gather in a community hall to share their experiences of a recent terrorist attack. After hearing…
Review from Theatrepeople by Adam Rafferty: February 8, 2016 Meekatharra in Western Australia’s remote mid-west is a naturally evocative Australian setting. Flat, red earth as far as the eye can see, dry, isolated and with a population of only about…
Review by Alison Croggon for Theatre Notes on 14 October. See here in it’s full context.
La beauté, “Beauty is difficult, Yeats” said Aubrey Beardsley
when Yeats asked why he drew horrors
or at least not Burne-Jones
and Beardsley knew he was dying and had to
make his hit quickly
Hence no more B-J in his product.
So very difficult, Yeats, beauty so difficult.
– Ezra Pound, Cantos
I left Whiteley’s Incredible Blue last night with Pound’s verse circling around my head. Barry Dickins’s new play, subtitled “an hallucination”, is almost an essay on the proposition of the difficulty and necessity of beauty, through the medium of the enfant terrible of Australian art, Brett Whiteley.
Review by Kate Herbert for The Herald Sun, October 14. See it in it's original context here. BRETT Whiteley, one of Australia's great painters, was a tortured artist - a self-indulgent, free spirit and heroin addict. In Barry Dickins' play,…
This review of Do not go gentle… was written by Andrew Fuhrmann for Crikey. See it in it’s original context here.
Photo by Jeff Busby: Malcolm Robertson, Pamela Rabe, Terry Norris and Anne Phelan
Dylan Thomas’ famous exhortation that old age should burn and rage at close of day is here filled out with a specific and passionate argument by playwright Patricia Cornelius: the rage against the dying of the light is the rage of memory, of memory projected forward into action, into the renewal or reconsideration of old convictions, into reconciliations, into fresh desires, into affirmations, and into new adventures.
This is the much-anticipated premiere production of 2006’s Patrick White Award winner, Do Not Go Gentle. It’s an unflinching, imaginatively drawn, life-and-death scenario, similar in the directness and ardency of its argument to Cornelius’s work with the Melbourne Worker’s Theatre and related in its arrangement to her contribution to Who’s Afraid of the Working Class?
Read the review of Do not go gentle… on Australian Stage Online below. See it in its original context here.
Written by Liza Dezfouli
Saturday, 07 August 2010 15:20
Left – Terry Norris, Anne Phelan and Rhys McConnochie. Cover – Pamela Rabe and Rhys McConnochie. Photos – Jeff Busby
Inspired by those famous words of Dylan Thomas and the story of Captain Scott’s trek to Antarctica in the early 1900s, Do Not Go Gentle by Patricia Cornelius is a beautifully rendered theatre piece. With a variety of dramatic responses to its themes this play gives a lovely sense of what’s possible on stage: images, music, opera, and simple poetic language; there is much to love about Do Not Go Gentle.
The review of Manbeth below is written by Joanna Bowen for Australian Stage Online. See the original review here. Manbeth is a riot of masculinity; within minutes, you can smell the testosterone. This retelling of Macbeth is set in a…
Below is a review of Othello by The Kingsmen, written by Liza Dezfouli for Australian Stage Online. See the original review here.
Othello | The Kingsmen
Written by Liza Dezfouli
Thursday, 10 June 2010 11:02
The geometric 90s looking set design tell you immediately that you’re in for something new and different with this production of Othello. The windows of the theatre space at 45 Downstairs are festooned with tapes of black and primary colours, suggesting the bars of a prison, the narrow window openings of a castle, or the timbers of a ship. Lighting is simple and there are few props. The action happens on the bodies of the actors, tightly choreographed into a piece that at times almost veers into dance. The actors tumble and roll; there is clowning and buffoonery a-plenty. The extensive development of a vocabulary of body language provides an original and vivacious aspect to this presentation of Othello’s dark story. The marrying of Shakespeare to physical theatre is an ambitious undertaking with a whole new level of performance to keep track of along with the demands of the language. It does make for a particular effort from the audience and, although the physical aspect is meticulously designed to support the script, the clowning is at times distracting; it may be that the cast hadn’t quite settled into the form and was having to work hard to deliver the story on so many levels.
Review of Open Water by Rebecca Jones, written by Bernadette Alibrando and published on the Walk to Art blog: I’ve decided that I am drawn to drawing and, of late, have been viewing drawing exhibitions and hanging out in drawing…
The below review is by John Bailey and was posted on his blog, Capital Idea, on Friday 19 March 2010: This one's arriving a little late, but I've been super busy of late with this great new hobby. It involves…
A review of our current production of Men from ArtsHub: Men By Shelley Blake ArtsHub | Tuesday, March 16, 2010 There’s something quite raw about Brendan Cowell’s debut play Men, now playing at fortyfivedownstairs. After a brief season in 2009,…
Cameron Woodhead The Age March 11, 2010 THEATRE MEN By Brendan Cowell, Straightjacket Productions, 45 downstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, March 8-21 "BRENDAN Cowell's debut play, Men, is a savage comic dissection of the male psyche. This production throws star…
Two reviews in one day... not bad for a show that only runs for 4 nights. "The Memory Progressive blends dance movement with theatrical text, animated projections and a blistering score, to examine the aftermath of severe memory loss. Focusing…
There is a review of The Memory Progressive by Chloe Smethurst in The Age today: "DANCE THE MEMORY PROGRESSIVE Phantom Limbs, fortyfivedownstairs, until tomorrow THE fleeting nature of dance, which only exists in the moment of performance, owes a huge…
"Nature as History is a series of new photographs by Imogen Barraga Hall. Her 7th solo show, Imogen has been taking photographs since 2005 after her house tragically burnt down in rural NSW. But proving that something good can come…