1990

Mango Season

by Michael Doneman

Directed by Angela Chaplin

Design : Kathryn Sproul

Choreography : Belinda Saltmarsh

Cast: Nick Hope, Claire Jones,

Kate Roberts, Peter Wood plus

Unley Youth Theatre – Roz Evans, Arabella Gryst, Emma Sheldon, Freya Newton, Alison Walsh, Alex Witham, Sara Oliver, Hayley Smith, Diarmid Lee, Sarah Marr, Ben Kempster.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Mango Season is the fruit of a Creative Development Project formed between Michael and Ludmila Doneman’s Brisbane based Contact company, Darwin’s Corrugated …

1990

Prophets and Loss

Produced and Directed by Gabrielle Kelly

and Nick Hart-Williams

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Global warming is the kind of subject likely to put a chill around the heart. It is perhaps for that reason that apart from specifically ordained days of lamentation or the usually unhelpful raiment tearing that we find on TV, the environment as a subject does not rate attention. We get the Nostradamus doomwatch stuff or specific details of spills and toxic waste …

1990

No Sugar

by Jack Davis

Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney and

Western Australian Theatre Company

Tandanya Theatre, October 1990.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

No Sugar is Jack Davis’ third play. After Kullark in 1978 and The Dreamers four years later, he was commissioned by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust in 1984 to write two plays. That must be some of the best grant money ever spent. The results were Honey Spot, a splendid play for young people which  premiered …

1990

Murray Bramwell talks with playwright Michael Doneman about  his new work for the Magpie Company – Mango Season, which opens at the Odeon Theatre next week.

Michael Doneman describes himself as a recidivist Queenslander. After ten years working in theatre in Sydney he returned to his Brisbane base firstly to teach and then more recently, to establish Contact, a theatre for young people.

Over the past year Doneman, in cahoots with Darwin’s Corrugated Iron Company, the Two to Five …

1990

Capricornia

by Xavier Herbert

Adapted for the stage by Louis Nowra

State Theatre Company

Playhouse, September, 1990

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

In his 1938 saga, Xavier Herbert used Capricornia as the name for Australia’s Top End. But it is not just a fictional geography , it is also a mythic one. In a profusion of storylines the novel tells how the half-caste Nawnim/ Norman Shillingsworth seeks identity not in two worlds but in three. On the brink of Asia, …