Idea: Identity
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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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The Lark review: A life of endings, but not ended Does wanting more from life mean the life you lived wasn’t enough? At 75, Rose stands inside The Lark—the country pub in which she was raised, worked and grew old—as she prepares to leave it for the final time. The building is about to be…
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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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La Traviata is opera at its most devastatingly beautiful. From Verdi’s sweeping score to the sheer scale and elegance of the production, this is the kind of show that reminds you why opera has endured (eat it @tchalamet). The music is breathtaking, the performances are emotionally charged, and the set design is genuinely spectacular —…
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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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Being chosen can feel so much like being loved that we stop asking what it costs us. Heathers understands popularity and romantic love as parallel forms of seduction. The Heathers make Veronica feel socially chosen; J.D. makes her feel personally understood. Both gradually shift the boundaries of what she is willing to excuse until complicity…
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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…
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We often talk as though understanding another person is simply a matter of paying closer attention. Goodnight, Sweet Prince quietly argues otherwise. By placing us inside Hamlet’s mind rather than asking us to observe him from a distance, this adaptation transforms one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies into something unexpectedly contemporary. It isn’t simply about…
