unHOWsed review

Made by a group of formerly homeless women over the age of 50, UnHOWsed provides an opportunity for these women to share their experiences with homelessness and to raise awareness of the constantly growing number of homeless women in the country. A collaboration between theatre company Tashmadada and housing organisation Voices of the South Side, this multidisciplinary performance piece is a stark yet poetic exploration of life on the fringe of society.

Each performer (Carla Mitterlehner, Susan V.M. McDonald-Timms, Jan Grey, Diann Pattison, Maurya Bourandanis, Catherine Samsury, Karen Corbett, Liza Dezfouli) sits on a chair in a pit of sand. There are beams of light shining down from the ceiling, lighting up their individual faces in the otherwise darkened space. They take in deep, sharp breaths and move their bodies as they do. It’s hypnotic to watch and the expressions they wear are indicative of the stories they have to tell. The impact from all these elements display the strength and resilience in each woman but also hints at their fragility and vulnerability.

Do You Know Me? - Melbourne Fringe Festival preview

Melbourne Fringe Festival is a great opportunity to experience shows that you wouldn't ordinarily get the opportunity to see. Written by Tiffany Barton and Kim Ho, Do You Know Me? is one such example with a site-specific immersive show that shares the stories of Melbourne's homeless people and rough sleepers.

"Do You Know Me? is a collection of stories, scenes, song, animation and puppetry that explore the experience of homelessness," Barton tells me. "It's based on interviews I conducted with 12 homeless and ex-homeless participants and contains a lot of verbatim material. I mainly focused on their resilience and relationships as I didn't want the play to be poverty porn, so there's a certain lightness in the material to counterbalance the heaviness of the topic. We don't shy away with the darker stories however, we just try to temper them with some lightness and hope." 

Barton had never worked with Ho before and their collaboration was borne from a chance assignment during their Master of Performance Writing studies at VCA. "We were sent on a field trip to explore an area in the city and come back with a pitch for a site specific play. We went to Degraves Street and got talking to two homeless men who impressed us with their clarity and likeability," she recalls. "We pitched the idea for a site specific play about homelessness and the idea stuck."

Lost: 5 review

Australia playwright Daniel Keene has been writing for the theatre for almost 40 years and has a multitude of awards to his name. Presented as part of the Poppy Seed Festival, Ilumi-Nation Theatre's newest production, Lost: 5  takes five of Keene's monologues and weaves them together to share a variety of stories on homelessness set within the Melbourne CBD.

While not all monologues deal directly with the homeless and homelessness, director Michelle McNamara has chosen pieces that highlight human behaviour and how hopeless and alone people can feel. In some cases they shed light on why and how people find themselves without a home, particularly through Kaddish, where a man's grief of watching his partner die becomes all too overwhelming for him to accept and deal with.

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.