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October 01, 1993

Local Works

The Administrator
by Charles Jury
Little Theatre
University of Adelaide

The Grip and
The Grown-Up’s Playroom
by David Paul Jobling
Space

Sweetown
by Melissa Reeves
Red Shed Company
Red Shed

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

“The story/Is of two famous friends, Pythias and Damon,/The love between them, and the effect that had/On Dionysius, tyrant of the city/Syracuse, BC -say three ninety-one,/Or thereabouts- and the enemy of Carthage,/ A barbarous city. Broadly it may be stated,/No archaology and no scholarship/Infect this play. …

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Vox Populi

Hello Down There !

Junction Theatre Company
Space

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Hello Down There! first played in June this year when Junction presented this remarkable community venture at Theatre 62. Now under the auspices of the Festival Centre Trust’s New Works program it has had a return season in the Space.

It is impossible not to be impressed by the the energy and commitment of this project. With a cast of thirty four, a choir of twelve, a seven …

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September 01, 1993

Hot Tap

Hot Shoe Shuffle
David Atkins Enterprises
Her Majesty’s

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

One of the disappointments about show business at the moment is that almost everything is retro. It is as though we are so lost in a thrall of nostalgia that we have forgotten that when Forty Second Street first appeared in 1933 people walked into the movie theatres and saw images from the streets around them. Similarly, when South Pacific opened in 1949 the war was scarcely over. …

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Icon Tactics

Look at Me When I’m Talking to You
Barry Humphries
Her Majesty’s

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Edna Everage may want our eye contact but it is her unmistakable voice that greets us first in Look at Me When I’m Talking to You. With bridesmaid Madge providing sign translation on a large video screen Edna gives some guidelines for live theatre. We have not been given remote control units because they will not work- this is not television, the actors on …

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Lost Lives

And I’ll Give You All the Diamonds in My Teeth
by Jeanne Mazure
South Australian Writers’ Theatre
Red Shed

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

By coincidence we have recently had two new plays about the life of the mentally ill. But where Louis Nowra’s Cosi settled for comic exoticism, in And I’ll Give You All the Diamonds in My Teeth, South Australian writer Jeanne Mazure has delved deeper. A practising psychologist herself, Mazure has had a long association with her subject …

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Touching on the Truth

Brilliant Lies
by David Williamson
Queensland State Theatre Company
in association with State Theatre Company
Playhouse

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

David Williamson’s recent work has often seemed like a mixture of Ibsen and Ray Cooney. The ethical and social questions in plays like Top Silk and Money and Friends were constantly being short-circuited by broad comedy and one-liners. Complexity, if any developed, was distrusted by the writer. Besides, it might compromise passenger comfort. Much better to give the folks another …

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August 01, 1993

Noises Off

Cosi
by Louis Nowra
State Theatre Company
with the Red Shed

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The State Theatre Company in collaboration with the Red Shed Company is combating the winter blues with Louis Nowra’s Cosi, a comedy about a young man’s adventures directing a production of Cosi Fan Tutti with a cast of patients from a mental institution. The situation and theme have plenty of echoes – from Marat Sade and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to recent comedies …

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July 01, 1993

Night Terrors

All Souls
by Daniel Keene
Red Shed Company
Cardwell Street

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

All Souls continues the productive relationship between Daniel Keene and the Red Shed Company. Last year’s Low, a grim underclass tragedy featuring Ulli Birve and Syd Brisbane, drew admiring, often young, audiences to Cardwell Street. With All Souls, a Red Shed commission, Keene has extended his writing- sometimes over-extended it- but the result is a new work of considerable distinction.

All Souls is a dream play …

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December 01, 1992

Power and Puppets

Petrouchka
Australian Dance Theatre
Space

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Back in the Space with a three item program Leigh Warren’s ADT has been getting on with the business of being a dance company. Contract terminations and leadership changes are part of the process of continuity and change in any company but they cause upheaval and stress nonetheless. It can’t have been an easy environment for either Warren or his dancers to produce new work which makes the present season the …

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November 10, 1992

Left-Over Lives

Diving for Pearls
by Katherine Thomson
State Theatre Company
Space

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

There is much to admire about Diving for Pearls. Katherine Thomson’s play about the destruction of restructuring gets beyond the programmatic formulae of most current theatre dealing with contemporary issues. The cost of work to the working class in Australia has long been a theme in our naturalistic theatre- not least in Lawler’s The Summer of the Seventeeth Doll. But more recently the pace of industrial …

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