Author: Kate Foy

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iPhones in the Theatre

Apart from the obvious – TURN THEM OFF – subtle, humorous and not so subtle prompts as the house-lights dim, and notwithstanding the current debate on whether or not audience members or reviewers should ‘live-tweet’ a show from #tweetseats, there are lots of opportunities to capture images as aides memoires to a particular theatre experience … and not just on the iPhone of course, but other pocket-friendly phones as well.

I snapped this one as I left the Roundhouse in Brisbane on the opening night of I Love You Bro’ from La Boite Theatre. It’s a terrific poster corridor not dissimilar to the one in the Bille Brown Studio for Queensland Theatre Company and the loooong walk down to Wharf 1 and 2 theatres at Sydney Theatre Co.

By the way, who else loves theatre posters?

You might be interested in some shots I’ve taken of theatres round the world.

And the other side of the business of iPhones in the theatre – some earlier posts on apps for iPhone toting actors (from Groundling)

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Review: Domestic Violence in the Chatroom – I Love You Bro’ at La Boite Theatre

I’ve often found myself using the caveat about something outrageous from real life … mostly behaviour … you know how it goes, ‘If they put that on stage, no one would believe it!’ Well, someone did. Adam J Cass, in fact. The writer of I Love You Bro‘ La Boite’s latest, directed by David Berthold takes the real-life extraordinary circumstances of a 14 year old from Manchester in the UK who conspired to kill himself.  He and his dupe, an online chat friend ‘MarkyMark’ were eventually arrested and charged with attempted murder and incitement to murder. Yes indeed, an unbelievable (almost) real story and another in the ‘troubled teen’ genre, one that’s absurd, tragic and hints at that bogeyman of the ‘dangerous web.’ I thought in passing as I left the building after the performance that La Boite could quite easily have sub-titled their 2010 season as ‘People behaving crazily at full stretch.’ It’s been one of those years at the Roundhouse so far. Continue reading “Review: Domestic Violence in the Chatroom – I Love You Bro’ at La Boite Theatre”

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Review: ‘Forensic poetry’ Tender – and moor theatre and !Metro Arts Independents 2010

I’m sure Nicki Bloom, like that other playwrighting wunderkind Polly Stenham (That Face), is tired of hearing how marvellous it must be to write so well at such a young age. We tend not to gush quite so much over absurdly talented young musicians and sports stars but, somehow when it comes to writing plays, you’re not supposed to hit all the marks until you’re much older.  Just why you can’t be as prodigiously clever with imagination and words as you can with bat, ball or musical notes certainly escapes me.

Having got that off my chest, I have to say that Nicki Bloom’s first play Tender, currently playing at !Metro Arts for the Independents 2010 season really does demonstrate an impressive mastery of dialogue (I understand she also writes poetry) and, with this work at least, an equally striking command of dramatic form – not bad for someone aged 22 when she wrote it, had it performed by Belvoir Street’s B-Sharp and then Hothouse Theatre (Albury-Wodonga) and back to Griffin in Sydney. Continue reading “Review: ‘Forensic poetry’ Tender – and moor theatre and !Metro Arts Independents 2010”

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Songs for a New World (Review): Harvest Rain

With a few quibbles, I really enjoyed my first Harvest Rain-produced musical, Songs for a New World (1995) by Tony award winning composer Jason Robert Brown, directed by Tim O’Connor.  Four principal singers (Angela Harding, Luke Kennedy, Naomi Price and Luke Venables) are backed by a five piece band (Daniel Gibney, Daniel Grindrod, Marcus Parente, Jack Kelly and Matlohn Drew) and an acting ensemble of twelve – Harvest Rain’s interns getting some valuable on the job training.  The JWCoCA studio is a perfect space for small, ‘chamber musicals,’ and I fantasised as I drove home about how great it would be if Brisbane had a permanent small space dedicated to this kind of work, perhaps linked or associated in some way to music theatre training institutions around the state.  Anyway …

Songs for a New World is a play about relationships, and one of the more fragile of human emotions: hope.  It’s in the ‘small’ show musical class; the revue-style format is more of a mood piece, an essay as opposed to the full-blooded narrative book of most musicals, at least the blockbusters that many have come to associate with the American musical theatre.  Like others before and since, this musical work doesn’t rely for its success on big production values, but on the integrity and quality of the ideas, its music, and on the ability of a production to engage with the piece.  The play focusses on individual stories drawn from a cross-section of American society, people at decisive moments in their lives.  As a song-cycle, the work is also very much a musical-theatre actors’ piece, a meditation that explores a life’s realities set against its aspirations. Continue reading “Songs for a New World (Review): Harvest Rain”

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Review: Stockholm ‘The poetics of cruelty’ – La Boite Theatre

If this play were a comedy, you might be tempted to toss in a phrase like ‘sex in the kitchen’ for impact. Stockholm, however, is most definitely not a comedy, and whilst there’s sex-play aplenty in the kitchen in the STC production currently playing at La Boite Theatre, this reviewer left the auditorium on opening night feeling, well … gutted … a not inappropriate reaction given the play’s content and a set wall which features some wicked looking knives. This forensic dissection of a relationship from Brit writer Bryony Lavery works through the senses and probes the mind; it’s a powerfully realised 70 minutes of vital performance that could happen nowhere else but on stage.

Sometimes you see a work that triumphantly displays its theatricality; Stockholm is one of them.

The play’s title gives a clue to the thread running through the work, a syndrome that encompasses the love-hate relationship between captor and the captured, the powerful and the powerless, the torturer and the tortured. Todd and Kali (incidentally, the Hindu goddess of death, and wife of Shiva) reminded me a lot of another warring, dramatic couple – George and Martha, albeit in the kitchen with knives rather than in the living room with booze where Albee sets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It’s the same, drawn out dance of death, both couples locked in an embrace designed to hurt and to go on repeating itself ad nauseum. Indeed, those knives on the wall can also call up an impression of an abattoir; you just know there’s going to be blood on the floor before the night is out. Stockholm also creates a good-looking, middle class world for its well-heeled characters to inhabit – that designer kitchen and smart chat are just veneer on a surface. Finally, there is a palpable feeling of isolation in this self-absorbed world, one that excludes all but the protagonists.
Continue reading “Review: Stockholm ‘The poetics of cruelty’ – La Boite Theatre”