Mean green mother from outer space: Luckiest Productions & Hayes Theatre’s Little Shop of Horrors

Filmed in two days and one night, Roger Corman’s 1960 B-movie The Little Shop of Horrors made inventive use of comedy, horror, and science-fiction elements in a pastiche which has since gained a cult following. Premiering in 1982, Little Shop of Horrors – Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s perennial musical based on Corman’s film – is a mainstay of the amateur and community musical circuit, as well as spawning the 1986 film-musical directed by Frank Oz. Now, it receives a thrilling twenty-first century revival the hands of Dean Bryant and the team that previously brought Sweet Charity to life in Sydney in 2014.

Room temperature: STC’s Arcadia

This is a revised version of a piece written for artsHub.

VALENTINE: Heat goes to cold. It’s a one-way street. Your tea will end up at room temperature. What's happening to your tea is happening to everything everywhere. The sun and the stars. It’ll take a while but we're all going to end up at room temperature.

Known for his wit and wordplay as much as his intellectual rigour (and occasional density), Tom Stoppard’s plays are a marriage of big ideas, drama, and the occasional gimmick, but they never fail to dazzle in one way or another. No matter how dense or impenetrable the science or intellectual debate behind his work is, you generally leave one of his plays “wondering whether you have just been educated or entertained, in the end allowing for the likelihood of both,” as William W. Demastes wrote. Arcadia, written in 1993, is without a doubt Stoppard’s most perfectly constructed play – on a technical level as much as a narrative one – and has led to it, not undeservingly, labelled “the greatest play of our age.” Described by Stoppard himself as “all sex and love and romance and jokes,” Arcadia is at once fiercely intellectual (in typical Stoppard fashion), but it also has a strong emotional counterweight, and manages to combine both of these – through the constant juxtaposition of two time periods, two-hundred-odd years apart – with flair, wit, lightness and, ultimately, poignancy. Presented here by Sydney Theatre Company, Richard Cottrell’s Arcadia certainly looks handsome, but like Mr Noakes’ improved Newcomen steam engine, it doesn’t quite reflect the sum of the energy and care that has gone into it, and “repays eleven pence in the shilling at most.”

Family matters: Tooth and Sinew’s Year of the Family

Scottish playwright Anthony Neilson, more widely known for The Wonderful World of Dissocia and Edward Gant’s Amazing Feats of Loneliness, was a key component of the ‘in yer face’ theatre movement which flourished in Britain in the 1990s. While the movement was perhaps misnamed – ‘in yer face’ did not so much seek to repel or alienate audiences, but rather explore the boundaries of what could (or couldn’t) be portrayed in a theatre, and to confront and challenge audiences – Neilson’s work still carries the hallmarks of that movement; but now, twenty-odd years later, what might have been deliberately shocking at the time (1994) now seems rather odd and not-quite-as-shocking, although Tooth and Sinew’s production is an assured, handsome, and strangely moving one.

Party animals: Belvoir’s The Blind Giant is Dancing

First produced thirty-three years ago, Stephen Sewell’s The Blind Giant is Dancing is often hailed as a modern Australian classic. And while it wears its passion and vehemence on its sleeve, it requires a good amount of assumed knowledge of the political context from which it was written; and even though party politics and factional in-fighting still continues to this day (it is something that will never quite go away), even though we now have ICAC, self-inflated housing bubbles, and besieged working class, and leadership which leaves a lot to be desired (to paraphrase Belvoir’s blurb), the ins and outs of Blind Giant’s political intrigue and machinations are a little too distant for us to fully grasp with clarity, and the result is a confusing, muddied, and long three hours.

Nowt more outcastin’: STC’s The Golden Age

Early on in her study of Louis Nowra’s work, Veronica Kelly remarks upon the fact all of Nowra’s work seems to be focused around outcasts or outsiders, the experience of being an outsider, as well as the physical and psychological landscapes the characters find themselves in. Written in 1985 and revised in 1989, The Golden Age is perhaps Nowra’s most pertinent and, certainly, his most epic play to date. It is also a play that is not afraid to ask the big challenging questions, even if it knows it does not – cannot – hold all the answers itself. Inspired by a possibly-apocryphal story about a group of people found in the Tasmanian wilderness in the late 1930s who were descended from convict runaways and social outcasts from a hundred years earlier, Nowra’s play follows this ‘lost tribe’ out of the bush and the myriad repercussion their arrival brings for them and the two young men who stumbled across their camp. Directed here by Kip Williams for Sydney Theatre Company, this ‘thirtieth anniversary’ production of The Golden Age straddles war and peace, and ranges from Tasmania to Berlin and ancient Greece, with skill, integrity, humanity, and passion. In Williams’ hands, Nowra’s play bursts onto the stage in an earthy, exuberant, and intensely moving way that defies you to see its true age, and demands we hold it in its rightful place in Australia’s dramatic and cultural legacy.

Earth cry: Stone Soup & Griffin Independent’s Thomas Murray and the Upside Down River

The thing I love most about the Stables theatre is the size of its stage. No other theatre in Sydney that I can think of has a stage quite like it – in size, shape, or layout – and I am constantly amazed at how malleable it is; no two productions ever feel quite the same – sometimes the space feels bigger, sometimes smaller, sometimes grander or more intimate, sometimes even a different shape, as directors, designers, and theatre-makers call upon our imaginations to inhabit and make total the world presented on stage. As you enter the theatre from the stairs, the first thing you notice is the dusty light, a golden glow like the sun, like lamp-light, like candles and canvas; the floor – that precious little diamond space – is covered in planks of timber, time-worn and much-loved, creams and greens and reds and browns and greys, all slotted together in a jigsaw of a stage, like a patchwork quilt, a farm seen from the air. To one side, a ladder and chair; to another, a tyre swing; behind it, a canvas backcloth. And as the lights dim, a figure enters, breathing heavily, covered in dust and mud and dirt, and the space begins to hum with a resonance I have not quite seen in that space for a little while. And it is beautiful.

Not quite fantastick: Wooden Horse & Hayes Theatre Co’s The Fantasticks

This review was originally written for artsHub.

Written in 1960, you could be forgiven for thinking that The Fantasticks is a period piece. But in the Wooden Horse/Hayes Theatre Co production directed by Helen Dallimore, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s musical is brought forward in a clever and, for the most-part, considered staging which exudes a quirky kind of charm. Sitting somewhere between Romeo & Juliet and a Tim Burton film (think, Big Fish), with a dash of a twisted Elizabethan revenge drama, The Fantasticks is the story of two single fathers (Laurence Coy and Garry Scale) who want their children (Jonathan Hickey and Bobbie-Jean Harding) to fall in love, so pretend they’re in the midst of a bitter feud, and build a wall between their two houses. Unable to determine how to end the feud, they enlist the help of El Gallo, a Pirandellian narrator-cum-stage manager, who concocts a diversion to ensure everything ends well. Or does it?

You gotta get brave: Belvoir's Jasper Jones

A darling of the Australian literary landscape ever since it was published in 2009, Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones is the story of fourteen year old Charlie Bucktin who lives in small-town Western Australia, and dreams of writing the Great Australian Novel. But when Jasper Jones appears at his window one night, Charlie knows something’s happened. Something terrible has happened that night, and the two boys take it upon themselves to get to the bottom of it. With a beautiful warmth of spirit and a keenly-observed ear for humour, Silvey’s story does not shy away from the darker side of small town life, and manages to bring the politics of the Sixties into this coming-of-age novel in a way that does not feel forced or abbreviated. Following its premiere in Perth in 2014 by Barking Gecko Theatre Company, Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Jasper Jones now opens at Belvoir as the first production for 2016 – and indeed for Eamon Flack’s artistic directorship – and in many respects, there could not be a better show to kick-start the year.

2016, the year in preview

In Sydney’s theatres this year, there are many shows to look forwards to – Griffin has the 2015 Griffin Award winner The Turquoise Elephant, Phillip Kavanagh’s Replay, and Finegan Kruckemeyer’s Those Who Fall In Love Like Anchors Dropped Upon The Ocean Floor; Belvoir has a season of general munificence, including Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Jasper Jones, Kit Brookman’s The Great Fire, Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife, Twelfth Night, and the conclusion of Matthew Whittet’s Windmill trilogy in Girl, Asleep; STC has Arcadia, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Golden Age, Almeida’s King Charles III, and 1927’s Golem, as well as Angela Betzien's The Hanging; Bell Shakespeare has Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and another Molière adaptation in The Literati, a co-production with Griffin. There’s a cracker year at Opera Australia with John Bell’s production of Carmen, and Julie Andrews’ My Fair Lady; Sport for Jove’s No End of Blame, Away, and Three Sisters; a new Andrew Bovell play; and (fingers crossed) Squabbalogic’s original musical-theatre take on The Dismissal.

2015, the verdict

THEATRE

Event(s) of the Year Ukchuk-ga: Pansori Mother Courage – Sydney Festival Camille O’Sullivan: Changeling – Sydney Festival The Tempest – Bell Shakespeare What Rhymes with Cars and Girls – MTC Orfeo ed Euridice – Spectrum Now
Honourable Mention 4.48 Psychosis; Manic Pixie Dream World – SUDS All About Medea – Montague Basement Of Mice and Men – Sport for Jove Battle of Waterloo – STC Love and Information – STC & Malthouse Man of La Mancha – Squabbalogic A View from the Bridge – Young Vic [NT Live]
Dishonourable Mention Tabac Rouge – Sydney Festival Five Properties of Chainmale – Arts Radar & Griffin Independent The Rocky Horror Show – Richard O’Brien She Only Barks at Night – Living Room Theatre Jumpy – STC/MTC
Best (New) Play What Rhymes with Cars and Girls, Aidan Fennessy Battle of Waterloo, Kylie Coolwell Extinction, Hannie Rayson Manic Pixie Dream World, Tansy Gardam	The Most Pertinent Award ASYLUM – Apocalypse Theatre Company
The ‘Proud Overdaring’ Award Masquerade – Griffin Theatre Company, STCSA, & Sydney Festival Mother Courage and Her Children – Belvoir Edward II – Sport for Jove	Shakesproud The Tempest (dir. John Bell) Hamlet (dir. Saro Lusty-Cavallari) Love’s Labour’s Lost (dir. Damien Ryan)