Multiple Bad Things review

In Back to Back's new work, Multiple Bad Things, three employees in a warehouse spend their day putting together an ambiguous structure. As they complete this task, they take part in conversations and present behaviours focusing on inclusion, equity and diversity.

As you walk into the theatre, you are instantly captivated by Anna Cordingley's set design. Erected like a triptych, a computer workstation is positioned on one side, with numerous animal figurines decorating the entire desk. On the other side rests an inflatable flamingo float. In between the two are a variety of gold-coloured pipes and tubes in a half-finished construction that dominates the stage. Cordingley's aesthetic skill extends to the costuming of the cast, with Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring and Scott Price appearing in distinctive orange uniforms and Bron Batten dressed in pink, looking like she's just stepped out of a Barbie movie.

Peacemongers review | Darebin Arts Centre

Bigotry. Discrimination. Exclusion. They can all go in the bin. We don't need them in society. In 2020, artist collective The People (headed by Morgan Rose and Katrina Cornwell) began to write about this. Along the way, a collaboration was formed with artists Sonya Suares, Samuel Gaskin, Kate Hood, İbrahim Halaçoğlu and Zachary Pidd, and gradually their approach changed from looking at what they don't like about society, to what they do like, and what a new world order should resemble, with a focus on inclusion. Which brings us to Peacemongers, an interactive, experimental, live art, musical theatre stage show that comes with dinner. Quite a mouthful!

Having seen this diverse group of performers (except for Halaçoğlu) in other projects, I was excited to see what the evening had in store for us. Hood unfortunately was unable to be part of the season due to interstate work, but she is cleverly kept as an integral member of the production through pre-recorded segments that blend in perfectly with the live performances. The group shares the challenges they have faced over the last four years, with references to covid and lockdown times and the numerous funding rejections they receive. They recall Peacemongers' evolution, including several working titles that reflected the nature of the project and the difficulties of creating a work that seeks to embrace everyone and provide a safe space for all.

Write-Off review | Melbourne International Comedy Festival | Charles Dickens Tavern

Sean Collier is a 26-year-old white, straight man from New Zealand and he has plenty to say. This is mainly about how screwed up his life is and how equally screwed up society is. Equipped with a microphone, a beer and a backwards cap, Write-Off is an opportunity for Collier to get a lot of things of his chest in an irreverent and brazen but highly entertaining stand-up routine.

Collier talks about growing up in New Zealand in a town where there were not many prospects and built on violence and racism. But he manages to bring these things together that remains honest to his experiences and concerns while providing a great deal of laughter. Drug use and addiction, prison, homelessness and even rimming are not exactly ground-breaking topics, but what makes Write-Off refreshing is the structure and punchlines and how dark Collier goes with his material.

small metal objects review | Back to Back Theatre | Federation Square

It's been 13 years since Back to Back Theatre performed their acclaimed show small metal objects in Melbourne, one that straddles the line between voyeurism, suspense and contemplation. Taking place in the public area at Federation Square, audience members take their seat on a row of bleachers and are provided with a pair of headphones where we are privy to the conversations happening between four people.

We begin by hearing two friends, Steve and Gary, talking about things that friends talk about, such as eating roasts and updates on relationships. We scan the crowd to locate where these people are, looking for anyone acting strangely, as if they are being watched. There are so many false alarms in spotting the actors. Eventually we see them crossing the road and walking onto Fed Square.

Grim review | Melbourne International Comedy Festival | Motley Bauhaus

Goodness. What a devilish delight that Grim is. Ellen Grimshaw plays Grim, an alien who gets pushed off their Mum's spaceship on their way to Data Collection Headquarters in Hollywood, landing in a Pepsi ad audition in Carlton. What? Yup. It's extremely ridiculous but if you accept it and move on, you get to really enjoy the performance by Grimshaw, the absurd humour and the chance to consider what the cost of always trying to please people can be.

Grimshaw is superb in this role. She completely gives herself over to Grim with the stuttering voice, the physicality and the outlandish red costume with accompanying wig. The alien language that she creates might sound like a bunch of nonsense but it genuinely feels like she's gone and made a specific noise for its equivalent English word, and whether she has or not is beside the point as it is still works on that level.

The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes review

Originally staged in 2019, Back to Back Theatre's The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes returned for a two night season in which we witness a group of people with disabilities setting up for a public meeting in a town hall. While we are not quite sure what the meeting is about, it eventually shines a light on all of us with regards to the society we want to be part of.

With over 15 years of experience with Back to Back and having co-authored the work, Sarah Mainwaring and Scott Price are joined on stage by fellow performer Chris Hansen. The three share a natural and organic energy flowing between them. Their engagement with the audience constantly changes from humorous and light-hearted to authoritative and knowing, making it difficult to prepare ourselves for what's to come and generating an air of uncertainty for everyone present.

AutoCannibal review

The world is ending. We are facing an intense heatwave, crops and animals are dying and people are starving to death. In Mitch Jones' solo physical theatre work AutoCannibal, we witness one of the last people on Earth spending his final days living with the same ignorance and self-destructive mode that led to civilisation's doom in the first place.

From a design point of view, the show is highly successful in creating a grim and desolate environment. The lighting design by Paul Lim and sound design by Bonnie Knight (with contributions from Marco Cher-Gibard) is a constant reminder of the bleak future that awaits our protagonist (and us). They work together incredibly well to create tension and unease right through to the final moments. Similarly, Michael Baxter's minimal scaffolding set design conveys a reality void of any human warmth.

Drive review | Theatre Works

In 2007, NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak, embarked on a 14-hour drive to confront her ex-partner's new girlfriend. When apprehended by police, they discovered a wig, a BB pistol and ammunition, pepper spray, an 8-inch knife and a hammer in her car. This was clearly not intended to be a friendly visit. Drive, a new Australian work by Rebecca Meston, looks to explore not only what causes a woman who seemingly has everything to have a complete breakdown and become enveloped by revenge, but also to contemplate the expectations that are placed on women by society to play certain roles.

Unfortunately, Drive is unable to live up to the excitement of its origin and spreads itself far too thin as it attempts to make a commentary about the various factors surrounding this event. The production is too cold and distant in allowing the audience to understand our protagonist's frame of mind, and this comes mainly from the writing and the direction. Considering that Nowak wore adult diapers during her drive to prevent any unnecessary stops, Meston's script has no sense of urgency and is void of any tension and suspense. Sasha Zahra's direction is too focused in theatricality and not from a connection or emotional response to the story.

LOVE review

We all love and we all want to be loved. It’s tough to live without it but in Patricia Cornelius’ compelling new play LOVE, the idea of the difficulties of loving and living is explored in its rawest form. The story centres on three disenfranchised youths (Carly Sheppard, Tahlee Fereday and Ben Nichols) all struggling to find a connection with one another, even if that means more heartache and pain in the long term.

Cornelius has crafted a simple story of people trying to determine who they are but with a tragic layered complexity to how everything unfolds, the production has the audience completely invested in Annie’s narrative and eager to see how things will end for her. It’s incredible witnessing Cornelius create poetry from such brutal and violent language and how the rest of the creative team brings this vision together.

The Three Graces review

Climate change, gender equality and the role of women in society all come together in Laura Lethlean's The Three Graces. Manifesting as a water fountain that has been turned off, three goddesses come together to voice their distress and opinions of where the world is heading and whether or not it's too late to work towards change. 

Madelaine Nunn, Candace Miles and Anna Rodway play Aglaia, Thalia, and Euphrosyne, collectively known as The Three Graces who were regarded to possess the essence of beauty, charm and grace. The three actors are dressed in various black jumpsuit-like outfits that echo peploi that The Three Graces would have worn, but also suits the characters they play in the contemporary scenes. While the three are adept with the material, the performances sometimes feel too exaggerated with big, expressive movements and dialogue that is awkward and unnatural.

The Pyramid - Melbourne International Comedy Festival review

Steph Tisdell wants to be the best at what she does. She wants to sit at the top of the pyramid. With so many pyramids to choose from though, the choice is not that simple and in her new stand-up show, The Pyramid, she looks at ideas behind power, leadership and how to determine where she sits on the pyramid, and which one.

What is extremely endearing about Tisdell is how open and natural she is with her audience when on stage. She is not performing, she is not putting on a persona or pretending she is anyone but herself. This is made crystal clear when on the night attended, she pauses in the middle of a sentence and exclaims “Oh my god, is that Miranda Tapsell??!” and then proceeds to lose her shit over the fact that Tapsell has come to see her show - and we love it. Similarly, her interactions with two audience members who may or may not be related to her go on for a bit longer than they should, but we still enjoy seeing her eyes light up as they discuss people they might know.

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."

For The Ones Who Walk Away - Melbourne Fringe Festival review

Do we accept the happiness of the majority, at the expense of the few? This is the question raised in For the Ones Who Walk Away with its immersive and interactive live art performance performed by over 50 children aged 9 - 18. Presented by St Martin's Youth Arts Centre, it's an ethereal yet dark exploration of humanity and the choices we make.

Audiences are initially separated into groups and led to a workroom to experience their first performance. From here, we are free to wonder around and enter whichever workroom we gravitate towards. The interactions in each room vary and I find myself playing the role of observer, participant and creator throughout the course of the evening. We are told there will not be enough time to visit each room, so I don't rush and walk through the hallway until I see a room that takes my interest. 

I approach a teenager girl who hands me a rock and begins to ask me numerous questions about my life. I respond by placing the rock along a chart on how accurate that statement is. I'm also asked to share my life story with her in less than a minute and not only do I find myself questioning how honest I should be with this stranger but also how honest I am with myself. Another room has attendees and performers going through the futile act of separating flower petals into colours while being dealt with some difficult "would you rather" questions: would you rather be sexist or racist?

Ode To Man | Melbourne Fringe Festival interview

There was a time when the ideal man was depicted as someone physically strong, being unemotional and considered the provider of his family. These stereotypes have done neither men nor women any favours. After her critically acclaimed season at the 2015 Melbourne Fringe Festival with We May Have To Choose, performance artist Emma Mary Hall returns to the festival with Ode To Man, in which she smashes through these stereotypes with poetic rage.

Ode to Man's structure is set around 15 chapters, with Hall exploring what being a 'real' man is, means and should be to both men and women. "The show was sparked by a traumatic break up, which resulted in me spending two years interviewing almost 100 men (including every man I dated during that time) and asking them what it was to be a real man," she explains. "The show is me telling you what I heard. It's also about me trying to figure out how to live with their answers."

Hall premiered this work at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) earlier this year to a sell-out season for what she refers to as a very personal and strange show. "It was wonderful to be working at the limits of my understanding of the work and what these ideas might say to others. There's a lot of discussion these days about gender and disconnection and confusion, but I don't see much work that is linking this confusion to the social and economic decisions we might make," she tells me.

Animal - Midsumma preview

For three nights during Midsumma Festival, audiences will have the opportunity to unleash their inner animal with Mikey J White's new work, Animal. This multidisciplinary piece incorporates theatre, music, burlesque, multimedia and spoken word to explore what it means to be 'human' in relation to sexuality, relationships and society through the duality of man and beast.

Earlier this year, White presented SXIINS (TWELVE SKINS), another multidisciplinary piece, which looked at identity and how to 'be a man'. Animal grew from what was conceived in SXINNS (Twelve Skins), but this time, his focus has moved broader by looking at how to 'be a human'. "Both these shows are about self exploration and identity. I like to constantly question and challenge myself and conventional social norms on what is the correct way to 'be a man' or 'be a human' or just to be," White explains. "I think a lot of this comes from being a queer man in a straight world and it has forced me to look at my views not only on sexuality but on the world in general."

Blessed review

The Poppy Seed Festival returns to Melbourne for its second year, opening with Fleur Kilpatrick's Blessed, a modern retelling of the angel Gabriel's visit to Mary informing her that she is to be the mother of Jesus. While her previous work, The City They Burned, successfully re-imagined the story of Lot and the fall of Sodom into contemporary times, in this production there is too much effort in pushing the religious undertones, whereupon I felt the authenticity of what Kilpatrick is attempting to create gets blurred.

The story follows Maggie and Grey (Olivia Monticciolo and Matt Hickey) who after years of no contact are reunited in Grey's grimy and shabby home. These are people who are from the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, living in community housing who are struggling to make ends meet with low paying jobs.

The Money review

"Are you a benefactor or a silent witness?" That is the question we are asked upon entering Kaleider's The Money. Presented as part of Melbourne Festival, the show is a live experiment on the way society works and how people with different background and experiences can come together for a common goal.

Those who choose to be - or become - benefactors sit in the middle of the chambers in the Prahran Town Hall. They each provide $20 to the kitty and have 60 minutes to decide what to do with the money. The money cannot be given to a registered charity, the money cannot be split, it must be spent on legal activity and it must be a unanimous decision between the benefactors. Other than that, we can do whatever we choose.

Thank You for Coming: Attendance review

Attendance is the first work of a three-part series entitled Thank You for Coming by Brooklyn-based choreographer and director Faye Driscoll. Presented as part of Melbourne Festival, the dance performance explores how we react in social situations and how we perceive ourselves and others in these environments.

After an entertaining reminder to switch off our phones, the five dancers (Giulia Carotenuto, Sean Donovan, Alicia Ohs, Toni Melaas and Brandon Washington) enter the stage, set in the round, and their bodies begin to intertwine and form various intricate tableau-like poses. Legs rest on shoulders, arms grab legs and heads rest on stomachs; despite the chaos and the unnatural poses created, there is a sense of calmness and tranquility in the moment.

Beers and Trees review

Performed as part of La Mama's 2015 Explorations season and developed with the assistance of Theatre 451, Beers and Trees by Allee Richards is a humorous yet thoughtful look at not only what makes a person strive for good, but what makes a 'good' activist and just how important this activity is? We all want to change the world and make it better for everyone but we also want to be happy and fulfilled by our own needs and desires. It's a fine balancing act to get it just right and the question of where this balance lies is what the five characters presented here attempt to answer. 

Adrian Del-Re is the stand out performer in the cast with his portrayal of Brad being highly natural, nuanced and convincing. The delivery really highlights the comfort that Del-Re has found with this character, and his scenes with Julia Hanna (Ruby) are the most entertaining of the show. Playwright Richards has succeeded admirably in finding clear voices for these two characters and really fleshing them out. 

Homme review - Melbourne Fringe

Created by the House of Vnholy and performed as part of the 2015 Melbourne Fringe Festival, Homme is a performative piece that explores male identity and contemporary masculinity within Australia. Through a series of vignettes and in complete silence, the differences between what it means to be a male and be a female are subtly explored.

It is standing room only during the performance, with Homme enveloping virtually the whole space. The white flooring is bare except for a number of select items, including a washing machine, a bundle of black balloons, a megaphone and a plinth. The two performers – Matthew Adey and Natalie Abbott - are dressed in black and the only time they speak is when they ask audience members for assistance with the props.