Australia has always had a love for cooking shows including, Ready Steady Cook, The Great Australian Bake Off, Masterchef and Jamie's Kitchen. The latter, hosted by chef Jamie Oliver, eventually led to Oliver's 30 Minute Meals, where a healthy, instagram worthy meal could be prepared in 30 minutes. As part of the 2019 Melbourne Fringe Festival, theatre company Stage Mom (Alberto Di Troia and Hannah Fallowfield) have taken this idea and brought it to the stage with their show, I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Cooking For.
A live art culinary event held in an inner north Melbourne home, the evening consists of a Fringe Festival artist cooking one of Oliver's 30 Minute Meals live in front of an audience. "It's interesting how easily cooking translates into a performance setting. Cooking is already highly performative and we're simply pointing it out!" Di Troia and Fallowfield tell me. "The show is an intimate and site-specific experience for audiences, with some very tasty treats and surprising participatory elements that we promise aren't at all scary! We have a number of extraordinary Fringe Artists being taken out of their comfort zone and will hopefully have everyone seeing Jamie Oliver in a completely different light."
It’s may be almost 170
years since Gothic literature writer Edgar Allan Poe died under mysterious
circumstances but in Broad Encounters immersive theatre production A
Midnight Visit, he is brought back to life and entice his audience to face their
fears in an evening of macabre entertainment. Audiences are left to wander
through the maze of 36 rooms as they come across various figures from Poe’s
life, characters from his stories and even the writer himself. What happens
next depends on the path you choose to take.
We are initially greeted by an undertaker who prepares us for
entry into an unpredictable and macabre dream world. With surgical masks over
our faces to prevent us contracting any diseases (and to add to the unsettling
anonymity of the evening) we begin our journey into the dark recesses of the
mind. As many scenes play out simultaneously in this labyrinth, it is
impossible to see everything unfold. This makes it difficult to piece together
a structured narrative but choosing to see the evening as a series of vignettes
taken from Poe's life and his writing, heightens the unease permeating
throughout the production and allows you to focus solely on what is
happening.
It's been over
two decades since Nick Enright's Blackrock was first performed, which explored the
fallout in a beachside town after a teenager is brutally gang raped and
murdered. Sadly these crimes have become a common occurrence in Australia, and
EbbFlow Theatre Co.'s production is a timely reminder as to
how little has changed in attitudes to violence against women.
Whereas Enright's play
focuses predominantly on the men and themes around loyalty and mateship,
director Nicola Bowman ensures that time is provided to the women of Blackrock and that their voices are heard. Ordinarily this would give a new perspective to the source
text but in this instance the majority of female characters are all angry and
disgusted by what has happened and while they are completely justified in this, it does not allow for
any dramatic tension and many of its teenage characters blend into one.
In Islamic religion, Muslim men who die as "believers" are
rewarded with 72 beautiful perpetual virgins as wives
in heaven. These women are known as houris. In Emina Ashman's Make Me A
Houri, two women who meet in the afterlife begin to question and confront
how religion and society view and use their bodies and their spirits.
Ashman creates some moving poetry with her story of these two women as they
come to grapple with their own desire and the expectations placed upon them. Regardless
how confronting the topics discussed are, through her considered and open dialogue, she allows the audience to lower their guard and be drawn into what
is transpiring. Where this story comes up short is that the characters are
largely unchanged throughout it. There is no build up to anything climatic or
revelatory and the women remain static as they recall personal experiences
that lead into deeper philosophical analysis.
Kevin Peterson is the new kid on the stand-up comedy block with his new show opening at The Butterfly Club. He's young, likeable and has the boy next door charm, but he's barely into his set when he is hit with a severe anxiety attack and becomes lost in his own distressing thoughts. Fortunately, this is not real life but the synopsis for Kevin Peterson’s Stand Up Show.
Written and directed by Max Paton, the show is a comedic and surreal look at what happens inside the mind of a man when he is struck with anxiety. Paton finds clever and intriguing ways in exploring Kevin's emotional and mental state and illustrates this brilliantly on stage. A constant highlight is seeing how the material from Kevin's stand-up routine, including "jokes" about Chris Hemsworth and platypus, is then referenced and used during his existential nightmare.
