Magill’s last tape: Siren Theatre Co’s Misterman

First staged in 1999, Enda Walsh’s Misterman is a tour-de-force monologue which twists and turns, before punching us in the gut. Directed by Kate Gaul at the Old Fitz theatre, it is a harrowing and entertaining play about one man’s crusade to bring God to the townfolk of Inishfree.

The play – or monologue, if you prefer – is the story of Thomas Magill, played with relish by Thomas Campbell. Magill is an unstable man in his mid-thirties and, like in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, much of the interactions between characters in Walsh’s play come from banks of reel-to-reel tape recorders scattered around the set. With echoes of Beckett, Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, and James Joyce’s Ulysses – in that it is one man’s journey through a town over the course of what could be a day – Walsh’s (very) blackly comic play builds to a terrifying conclusion.

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.

Into the woods: Siren Theatre Company & Griffin Independent’s The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You

One thing that never ceases to intrigue me about the tiny little Griffin stage is how malleable it is. No two productions ever feel quite the same – it seems bigger or smaller, grander or more intimate, a different shape, as though we’re in a different (larger) theatre entirely; it all depends on any one production’s stagecraft, direction and energy, the way the tiny diamond space is used.

In The Violent Outburst That Drew Me To You, presented by Siren Theatre Company with Griffin Independent, the space is filled by Jasmine Christies’ circular curtain set which is drawn and opened as needed, becoming a shadow-screen and a clever framing device, allowing for a playful sense of theatricality and youthful exuberance. Old wooden school chairs, simple items of costume and Hartley T A Kemp’s story-book lighting complete the illusion and the show, an uninterrupted seventy minutes, feels rather like a pop-up book, albeit not quite one for younger children.