This
review appeared in an edited form on artsHub.
The old adage goes
that you should never work with children, animals, or firearms. In Living Room
Theatre’s (henceforth LRT) new performance installation, children and
animals play a central role in evoking the world of hysteria. Presented in
association with the Sydney Environment Institute and Sydney
University’s Macleay Museum
and Veterinary Science faculty, LRT’s She Only Barks at Night is an eerie and unsettling evening, though perhaps not always as its creators intended.
Rapid-response
theatre flies in the face of theatrical tradition, but it shouldn’t always be
like that. The average play takes approximately two years to reach the stage,
by which time any topicality it may have had initially has long-since passed.
Enter rapid-response theatre, where plays appear on stage mere weeks after
being pitched or commissioned. You might remember Hollywood
Ending at Griffin
in November 2012; where that project took nine weeks to journey from concept to
the stage, Asylum – a twenty-four-play
cyclical response to the federal government’s Operation Sovereign Borders – appears
approximately four weeks after pitching. The plays here are raw, unsentimental,
unflinching; visceral. Under the artistic direction of Dino
Dimitriadis, Apocalypse
Theatre Company hosts 97 artists in a fearless and challenging exploration
of what it means to seek asylum, what it means to come to Australia by
boat, how it affects us – personally, as a community.
