Barking mad: Living Room Theatre’s She Only Barks at Night

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.

Another cup of tea: SUDS’ The Bitterness of Pomegranates

Over the past couple of years I’ve seen a number of productions set largely in kitchens or houses, and have read numerous books in which important conversations are had in kitchens, and many conversations with my friends have been shared in their kitchens. You could dismiss it as “everything including the kitchen sink” but that’s not it; it’s not the sink that is crucial, nor the kitchen itself if we’re being honest, but rather the rawness and unguarded nature of the conversation which happens when you’re in a place you feel safe in. Helen Garner knows this, which is why in all her books you’ll find kitchens as little theatres of life, crucibles of thought and action, meeting places, familial communal spaces; ordinary theatres of mundanity where extraordinary things happen. And so it is with SUDS’ The Bitterness of Pomegranates.

Written and directed by Julia Clark, ‘Pomegranates’ is a (new) play set in a small (unnamed and unlocated) Australian town, and follows a family as one sister befriends the town odd-bod (or ‘lunatic’ as we are told on the production’s website, but I don’t like the term). It’s a play about the small-town rumour-mill, about babbling gossips and secrets that never remain so, how privacy is everyone’s business, and even though it’s a short play – no longer than fifty minutes – there is something in it which sticks to you.