The outsiders: Sport for Jove’s Of Mice and Men

Published in 1937, John Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men tells the story of two displaced itinerant workers, looking for work in Depression-era California. Based on his own experiences in the 1920s, Steinbeck’s book is a haunting and non-judgemental view of the world, something which ripples through a lot of his work from the 1930s and 40s. In an adaptation written by Steinbeck himself, Sport for Jove’s production – currently playing in the Seymour Centre’s Reginald theatre – is tight, elegant, mesmerising and atmospheric, richly evocative of the hardship of the era.

Apocalypse Theatre Company’s ASYLUM

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.

Fish are jumping: STC's Mojo

Written in 1995, Jez Butterworth’s Mojo is often credited with reviving the urban gangster genre, typified in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Now almost twenty years old, the play has lost none of its youthful exuberance and swagger, its rock’n’roll charm and its classic downward spiral of a revenge thriller-tragedy. Presented here by Sydney Theatre Company, Mojo is the story of a group of would-be teddy-boy petty criminals in 1950s London, with the stars of fame, fortune and success firmly in their eyes.

Caught by grace: Griffin's Jump For Jordan

Like an archaeological dig site, a mound of sand intrudes upon Griffin’s corner stage, bursting through a window, cascading downwards onto the sandy carpet. Through the window, a garden, dark leafy foliage. And inside the house? Well, there’s an argument going on, an argument perfected and cemented over time, and we’re thrust headfirst into the world of Sophie, a twenty-something archaeology student, her “mad Arab” family and her girlfriend Sam. There is no question of where we are, familially-speaking, and as the play’s ninety-odd minutes unfold before us, we shift backwards and forwards through time, through memories and stories, half-truths and disguises, dreams, sleepless nights; family history, anxious projections and conversations with people who can’t be there anymore.

Donna Abela’s Jump For Jordan won the 2013 Griffin Award, and is presented here in its premiere production in conjunction with the Sydney Mardi Gras by Griffin Theatre Company. As described in the script’s notes, “the scenes in the play are often constructed of layers of narrative that collapse in on each other... Attention must be on context as well as content. The borders between scenes are intended to be porous.” To use the archaeological metaphor again (it is apt, after all), Abela’s play digs through several layers of accumulated strata, sifting fact from fiction, family stories from emotions and reality, and the result is a beautiful and moving exploration of identity, culture and relationships, both romantic and familial, and trying to reconcile all the disparate elements of your life with one another.

VHS Productions' One Scientific Mystery or, Why did the Aborigines eat Captain Cook?

“But why did the aborigines eat Captain Cook?
It is unclear and the science is mute
The answer’s simple, that’s the way I look
They were just hungry and ate Captain Cook!”

 – Vladimir Visotsky, Why Did The Aborigines Eat Captain Cook?

Late on a midwinter night in St. Petersburg, Rhys returns to his freezing apartment to find his brother-in-law, Ben, unconscious and a naked woman about to jump out the window. The ensuing play is a little gem, by turns a comedic romance, a mystery, and something quite raw and beautiful, and it’s a play very much written from the centre of one’s soul, with its beating kicking heart on show, bared for all to see.

Playing at Darlinghurst’s TAP Gallery theatre, One Scientific Mystery, or Why did the Aborigines eat Captain Cook? is the first play from Victoria Haralabidou, and is about three people and their lives, played out over the course of a night, as they collide in an apartment; it’s about the moments we share with and glean from each other, the glimpses of someone else behind the person we see in front of us, the brutality of intimacy, and the unexpectedness of wanting to stay despite the odds.