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.

Golden summers: Opera Australia’s The Elixir of Love

“Once a jolly doctor rode into a country town
Handing out potions and pills for a fee
And he sang as the soldiers and gentlefolk all gathered ‘round
Who’ll come a-wooing Adina with me?”

You could say that Australia grew up on the sheep’s back. The pastoral dream of an idyllic Arden beyond the cities and town centres persisted until relatively recently – ‘over the hills and far away’ was where the pastures and grazing land were, where the romance of an unhurried lifestyle lived on and off the land was tantalising. Dorothy McKellar wrote “I love a sunburnt country,” and not so long ago the same could be said for many people. In Simon Phillips’ production of Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love for Opera Australia, we are transported to the summer of 1915, a country town beyond the mountains, when the Heidelberg School’s vision of golden summers was still conceivable; an Arcadian moment on the cusp of the “imminent loss of innocence.”

Rough magic: Ensemble's Richard III

You know the opening, that famous declaration. It isn’t happening yesterday, it isn’t happening tomorrow. It is happening right here, right now, on the stage in front of us, in as close to real time as we can get. It is immediate, present, in your face; unavoidable; NOW!

A cousin to the Hamlet he directed for the Studio Company at Riverside Theatres in 2004 and for the Ensemble in 2006, Mark Kilmurry’s Richard III, playing at the Ensemble Theatre, is characterised by a sense of making do, of finding old odd ends and repurposing them to new means; of finding new life in the dark and old.