After the Ball
David Williamson

Queensland Theatre Company
Her Majesty’s

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

After the fiscal wars of Money and Friends and the gender wars of Brilliant Lies, after the media wars of Sanctuary and the culture wars of Dead White Males, after Heretic and Third World Blues. After all this comes After the Ball – and what might be called the family wars.

But David Williamson’s newest play is not about huge sundering feuds. Not your …

The Mourning After
by Verity Laughton
Playbox
Space

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Belle Doyle may be by herself on the beach on Christmas Day but she is not alone. Verity Laughton’s comic weepie The Mourning After, is a monodrama with a cast of dozens. The situation is emotionally raw. Belle’s husband Harry has unexpectedly gone blue and died on the morning of Christmas Eve. In fact he has died in the middle of an argument over whether Belle, a song …

The North
William Yang

Space

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

When he presented Sadness at the Institute Hall in Kintore Avenue William Yang gave us one of the unexpected highlights of the 1994 Adelaide Festival. Idiosyncratic, intimate and full of wry good humour, Yang’s slide show did much to draw together the otherwise inchoate strands of Christopher Hunt’s program. This modest one- person show provided a regional perspective and dealt with regional ethnicity. But, unlike much of the abstracted, ethnomusicological fare …

Wolf Lullaby
by Hilary Bell

Griffin Theatre Company
Space

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

A large white kitchen chair dominates the minimal set for Hilary Bell’s powerful new play, Wolf Lullaby. Denoting a child’s perspective of the adult world it dwarves the two normal sized chairs set next to it. And when Lizzie, aged nine, climbs into it clutching her dolly, it also amplifies the enormity of the emotions and anxieties this play manages to conjure.

Lizzie lives with her mother, …