Idea: Grief
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In James Graham’s The Man, quite a lot. Ben is attempting his first tax return. As a sole trader, he has accumulated a year’s worth of receipts that must now be classified as either an EXPENSE or NO EXPENSE. Except the receipts contain information no tax return can record. A journey. A relationship. An embarrassment.…
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It is often said that a violent man “lost control”. Girls & Boys asks a far more frightening question: what if the violence was not an absence of control, but its most absolute expression? Dennis Kelly’s play begins like a romantic comedy. A woman tells us about meeting her future husband during an argument at…
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Can a cup of coffee and a dead canary really sustain an opera? Apparently, they can sustain three. Pinchgut Opera’s Coffee and a Dead Canary is a caffeine hit of Baroque music, glamour and glorious theatrical nonsense. Director Eugene Lynch pours three miniature cantatas and one flute concerto into a full-bodied blend that is extremely…
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The Drover’s Wife feels completely at home on the Joan Sutherland Theatre stage. Leah Purcell’s Molly Johnson remains a formidable presence throughout: a woman surviving the brutality of the Australian bush, protecting her children and navigating a world shaped by violence, racism and increasingly complicated questions about her own identity. The performances across the company…
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Some stories ask how we repair what has been damaged. House of Rot asks something more difficult: whether a life can still hold beauty, intimacy and meaning when the damage cannot simply be fixed. Sometimes the most beautiful stories aren’t about fixing what’s broken. They’re about discovering that beauty can still exist while you’re living…
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Power isn’t just about having more than everyone else. Sometimes it’s about having the freedom to step into other people’s worlds without ever having to live with what you leave behind. That’s the tragedy at the heart of Rigoletto. Opera Australia’s production makes this idea tangible through a stunning revolving set. Each turn reveals another…
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Does loving someone give you the right to ask them to remember? In Sophie Davis’s Forget Me, Please, Andi and Sasha meet after concussions and build a life together. But as Andi’s mental health deteriorates, the memories holding their relationship together begin to mean radically different things. For Andi, memory preserves pain. For Sasha, the…
