Monument review

Edith Aldridge has just 90 minutes to prepare for the most important day of her life, and it's not her wedding. Makeup artist Rosie has arrived at the hotel as a last-minute call-in to ensure Edith looks gorgeous, after all, how often do you get sworn in as the youngest female leader of a country? Written by Emily Sheehan, Monument explores the power that makeup, fashion and beauty hold over women and also the power that women can have from this. It's a delicate act that is captured by an intriguing and interesting premise.

Julia Hanna is brilliant as Rosie, a perfect foil to the matter-of-fact and calmly distressed Prime Minister. Her line delivery, pronunciation and speech patterns convey much about the character's background and make her inexperienced interactions with the Prime Minister seem genuine. Sarah Sutherland as the Prime Minister presents a woman who is slowly unravelling by forces outside her control and feeling the pressure of being relentlessly monitored over the minutest of details. She exposes Edith's emotional turmoil in a very raw way, including a compelling scene of her silently releasing her anger and frustrations out into the world.

Incognito review

The expression 'the mind works in mysterious ways' rings true in the stunning new work by Red Stitch Actors Studio. In its Australian premiere, Nick Payne's Incognito - a poignant play about the brain, Albert Einstein and love - is a beautiful exploration of how our mind works and how we use memories to create our identity and become the people we are.

The story focuses on three non-linear narratives, two of which are centred on real people. Thomas Harvey is the pathologist who conducted the autopsy on Albert Einstein and became obsessed with what could be revealed from research into his brain. The second story based on fact is of Henry Molaison, a 27 year old-man who - after an operation to cure his epilepsy - lost his short term memory which left him unable to remember the detail of conversations he had been having seconds earlier. The third story revolves around a fictitious neuropsychologist, Martha, who has a somewhat nihilistic view on identity and memories.

Love, Love, Love review

In June 1967, The Beatles appeared on Our World, the world’s first live television satellite link-up that was watched by roughly 400 million people across the world. While this major event was happening, playwright Mike Bartlett has envisioned a much smaller life-changing moment also occurring. In Love, Love, Love, presented by Red Stitch and directed by Denny Lawrence, two free-spirited nineteen year-olds meet for the first time in a small London flat. Sparks are immediate, and we visit their relationship again in 1990, and then in 2011.

The chance encounter between Kenneth and Sandra (Paul Ashcroft and Ella Caldwell) in the first act is full of excitement and energy and there is a genuine spark between the two actors. With the addition of Jordan Fraser-Trumble as Kenneth’s more conservative older brother, the script develops at a solid pace. However, the following two acts struggled to retain my interest as much as the first. There was nothing engaging or new about what I was watching and it culminated in a pseudo-ending with white middle-class people complaining about how hard life is. It reached the point where the characters themselves become far less likeable, especially Sandra who ends up resembling a B-grade character from Absolutely Fabulous.

Wet House review

A wet house is a hostel for alcoholic homeless men and women, where they can drink and sleep as much as they want with no expectations for them to be rehabilitated. They are more or less, the people that society has given up on. In Red Stitch's production of Paddy Campbell's Wet House, we get an insight into the lives of three residents and three workers of a wet house, each one struggling with their own redemption and reason for being.

Wet House is based on Campbell's first-hand experience of working in a wet house and you can see how effective a story can be when the writer well and truly knows what he is writing about. Not a single scene is wasted, no dialogue is filler, no movement is pointless. Everything that happens in Wet House has a purpose, and with six different stories being told, the pacing is controlled well and is never difficult to follow.