Reviews

Olivia Di Grazia finds this Elizabethan Reservoir Dogs at Theatre Works is a clever, amusingly absurd theatre curio, driven by an inventive script and plenty of knowing Shakespeare-Tarantino wit.

TWiSK received unprecedented access to the creatives and crew behind Red Stitch’s recent staging of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and its two rarely seen prequels. Through interviews with actors, designers and company leaders, a story emerged of risk, endurance and collective theatrical magic.

Not tragedy but testimony. Three actors embody the journey of Taungurung Elder Uncle Larry Walsh, showing the power of theatre as a vehicle for truth-telling and art as a form of memory activism. Olivia Di Grazia was at opening night.

Theatre Works brings another authentically Australian story to the stage: a tale of isolation, alienation, and miscommunication.  Red Sky Morning until 16 May.

It’s love, ethics and neuroscience in Lucy Prebble’s high-voltage psychological drama The Effect, presented by Theatre Works until Saturday 18 April. Reviewer Olivia Di Grazia grapples with the side-effects of the staging.

Theatre Works new staging of Tom Holloway’s Beyond the Neck, an emotionally resonant work based on testimony from those affected by the Port Arthur massacre. Marking 30 years since thirty-five lives were lost, this production assumes new relevance and poignancy in the wake of the tragic Bondi shootings. Review by Olivia Di Grazia.

Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, the grand finale of Lawler’s legendary Doll Trilogy, is not just a poignant portrait of illusion and arrested development, but a tragedy tracing the transformation of vitality into mythology, tradition into prison, hope into despair. TWiSK reviews play three in the Trilogy.

Other Times, the second instalment of Ray Lawler’s monumental The Doll Trilogy, functions more as a bridge than a destination. It testifies to the disenchantment that often lies on the other side of adulthood. TWiSK reviews the second part of the Doll trilogy.

Not since 1985 has Ray Lawler’s The Doll Trilogy –the Australian classic Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and its later-written prequels Kid Stakes and Other Times – been staged in its entirety. TWiSK reviews Kid Stakes in the first of a trilogy of reviews.

Reviewed by Olivia Di Grazia for TWiSK. Playing at Theatre Works until 21 February.