November 1, 2012

Notes from Underground

Pornography
by Simon Stephens
State Theatre Company
Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre
October 27.  Season October 18 – 27. 2012

On July 7^th 2005 four young men, three of Pakistani descent, one Jamaican, all aged between 18 and 30, drove from Leeds down to Luton where they caught a train connecting to the London Underground into the city. At 8.50am, three of them triggered suicide bomb devices in their backpacks and caused mayhem …

October 9, 2012
Adelaide
Theatre

Blasted
by Sarah Kane
State Theatre Company
Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre
October 8. Tickets $ 25 – $ 35
Bookings : BASS 131 246
Until October 13.

It is seventeen years since the twenty-something playwright, Sarah Kane detonated her play Blasted at London’s Royal Court Theatre. It caused an uproar then, and still disturbs and confronts even internet-jaded audiences now.

Director Netta Yashchin has a challenge with this unruly, iconoclastic text but with Wendy …

October 14, 2012
Adelaide
Theatre

Blasted
by Sarah Kane
State Theatre Company
Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre
October 8. Tickets $ 25 – $ 35
Bookings : BASS 131 246
Until October 13.

It was British critic, Alex Sierz who put a name to the angry, convulsive, confrontational new theatre emergent in the UK in the 1990’s. He called it “In-Yer-Face” theatre and it described, among many, the work of Mark Ravenhill, Anthony Neilson and Sarah Kane. Except that her …

August 21, 2012
Adelaide
Theatre

Top Girls
by Caryl Churchill
State Theatre Company
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
August 21. Tickets $ 25 – $ 59
Bookings : BASS 131 246
Until September 8.

It is almost thirty years to the day since Top Girls, Caryl Churchill’s freewheeling play about class, gender and the rise of Thatcherism, first opened at London’s Royal Court – and the question is : how much have things changed and how much have they stayed …

May 9, 2012
Adelaide
Theatre

The Glass Menagerie
by Tennessee Williams
State Theatre Company
The Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Theatre
May 8. Tickets $ 25 – $ 59
Bookings : BASS 131 246
Until May 26.

Tennessee Williams called it “the saddest play I have ever written” and, first performed in 1944, The Glass Menagerie is certainly his most autobiographical. “The play is memory”, the narrator, Tom, informs us in the startlingly direct opening address – “Being a memory play, it …

March 1 , 2012
Adelaide Festival
Theatre

The Ham Funeral
by Patrick White
State Theatre Company
Odeon Theatre, Queen Street
February 27. Tickets $ 25 – $ 59
Bookings : BASS 131 246 or Adelaidefestival.com.au
Until March 18

For his 2012 Festival production, State Theatre’s departing artistic director, Adam Cook has shown an astute sense of occasion. Not only is this year the centenary of Patrick White’s birth but it is just over fifty years since the programming of The …

October 25, 2011
Adelaide
Theatre

Holding the Man
by Tommy Murphy
from the book by Timothy Conigrave
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre.
October 25 . Tickets $ 29 – $59. Bookings : BASS 131 246
Until November 13.

As anyone who knows footy will tell you, holding the man is not just against the rules, but against Australian Rules. Timothy Conigrave’s 1995 memoir, Holding the Man, about his fifteen year gay relationship with his …

September 13, 2011
Adelaide
Theatre

Buried Child
by Sam Shepard
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre.
September 13 . Tickets $ 29 – $59. Bookings : BASS 131 246
Until October 2.

When we enter the ruined farmhouse of Sam Shepard’s 1979 Pulitzer prize winning play Buried Child we go through a familiar portal in American writing. This mix of realism and the grotesque, of Greek tragedy and grim comedy, is the territory of Eugene …

August 9, 2011
Adelaide
Theatre

Three Sisters
by Anton Chekhov
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre.
August 9. Tickets $ 29 – $59. Bookings : BASS 131 246
Until August 28.

In Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the second last of the extraordinary quartet of plays he wrote between 1895 and the year of his death in 1904, the characters have often been described as exiles – in time, as well as place. Not only are …