The karate kid: Belvoir & Stuck Pigs Squealing’s Back at the Dojo

The world according to Lally Katz is one populated with fortune tellers, Hungarian neighbours, golems, forgotten vaudeville troupes, the Apocalypse Bear, and the Hope Dolphin. It’s a world of magic, where things are not quite what they seem, where everything is a story in one way or another, and characters often find themselves returning to Earth sooner or later. After the success of Neighbourhood Watch and Stories I Want To Tell You In Person, and having read a number of her previous plays, the promise of a new play by Lally Katz was tantalising, and came with more than a few expectations. But even though the story is drawn from her own family mythology and features a character based on her father as a young man, it doesn’t quite feel like the play it should be, the play it wants to be, and as a result feels a little bit hollow, though not without heart.

Back at the Dojo – a co-production with Belvoir and Melbourne company Stuck Pigs Squealing, Katz’s former co-conspirators – is inspired by the story of her parents’ meeting. Drifting through 1960s America, Danny stumbles across a karate dojo in New Jersey and, like the other members of the dojo, finds his way again with the help of the strict but not unbending sensei, and a young woman called Lois. Set against this, in something of a stark contrast, is the other end of the story, that of Dan and Lois (now older and in contemporary suburban Australia), and their granddaughter who has decided to become Patti Smith. It’s a seemingly gloriously Katzian collage, drawn from real life, chance meetings, and the talents of her collaborators, but something is missing in both the script in a very basic narrative way, and in the production.

As the world falls down: Montague Basement’s Telescope

Following their production of Hamlet at the end of last year, I wrote that it had been “a pleasure to watch Montague Basement go from strength to strength in their productions, gaining confidence (and audacity), finding and sharpening their voice.” With 2016 already well-underway, this uncompromising collective are expanding the scale of their productions and drawing new collaborators into their fold. Following his well-received Kaleidoscope at the Mardi Gras festival in February, Charles O’Grady spreads his wings to bring Telescope to the Sight & Sound arts program in Leichhardt, and the result is a disarming and thoughtful production which asks questions we should be asking, and does not pretend to have all the answers.

Could happen to anyone: pantsguys & Griffin Independent's On The Shore of the Wide World

First performed in 2005, Simon Stephens’ On The Shore of the Wide World is the story of the Holmes family as they try and negotiate their world, and how they deal with whatever life throws at them. Told across a nine month period, we follow the parents, the children and the grandparents, as they fall in and out of love, as they try to make sense of everything. As produced here, in its Australian premiere production by pantsguys and Griffin Independent, this Laurence Olivier award-winning play is all at once elegant, sprawling and startlingly honest.