An almost perfect score: Sydney Festival’s Kiss & Cry

It begins like a fairytale – two people meet, there’s the heady giddy exhilaration of falling in love; there’s joy, heartbreak, sadness; a tiny glimmer of something else. Except there’s a twist: the two people – figures – are not human, but rather two dexterous hands. In Jaco Van Dormael and Michèle Anne De Mey’s Kiss & Cry, playing at Carriageworks for the last days of the Sydney Festival, a romance is played out on a miniature scale whilst simultaneously being filmed and screened above the action itself.

NSFC*: Darlinghurst Theatre Company’s Every Second

This review was written for Concrete Playground.

The Darlinghurst Theatre Company’s Eternity Playhouse, formerly the Burton Street Tabernacle, is the home to Vanessa Bates’ Every Second, a new play about infertility, IVF, families and wanting children. 

Set on a raised spiralling platform designed by Andy McDonell, the staging circles around the various topics, elliptically and directly, confronting them from various angles and various positions, with tensions rising and falling, ultimately rising to a crescendo-like tipping point between partners and Bates’ two couples.