There and back again: Spectrum NOW’s Orfeo ed Euridice

Produced without adornment, Shannon Murphy’s staging of Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice as part of the inaugural Spectrum NOW festival is a treat to savour. Staged within the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ entrance hall, restaurant and old courts, it is a moving processional presentation of one of Gluck’s reform operas which seeks to invigorate and reform our perception of opera itself, what it is, can be, and can be capable of, and it succeeds with an elegant simplicity and ingenuity which is beguiling.

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.

The reality of television: Griffin’s Beached

At eighteen years old, and weighing over 400 kilograms, Arthur (Arty) is the world’s heaviest teenager. With his gastric bypass surgery scheduled for 259 days’ time, he is assigned a Pathways to Work officer and put on a strict diet, while his every move is followed by a ravenous reality TV crew from a show called ‘Shocking Fat Stories.’ This is the world of Melissa Bubnic’s 2010 Patrick White Playwrights’ Award-winning play, Beached.

Directed by Shannon Murphy, Bubnic’s play is an unapologetically satiric and pointed look at the obesity epidemic, and tries to unpick “society’s insatiable appetite for human misery.” Murphy’s direction is bold and ambitious, her staging audacious and inventive, as she (ingeniously) shows us the artifice behind the ‘reality’ of reality television. In a set constructed like a television studio, two patterned walls create a corner in which Arty sits, while cameras, lights, backdrops and costumes hang from the rungs of a cage-like scaffold which moves around him, encasing and restricting his movement and freedom.