Kate Prendergast

Do you enjoy being talked at for 90 minutes? Because that’s what Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World does. Part experimental performance, part anti-murder mystery, part hyperspeed TED Talk on the nature of truth and knowledge in our globalised post-colonial times, Things Hidden boasts many hallmarks of contemporary theatre. For instance: big projections on multiple screens (which ‘authenticate’ and enhance what’s told, while also showing the devious nature of the image) and the energetic dismantling of storytelling’s normative conventions.  A brain-crushing hydra, it’s a little hard to summarise, but I’ll try.  Fereydoun Farrokhzad was an Iranian entertainer and political activist, famous in the ‘70s. Imagine an Iranian Tom Jones. In the ‘90s, as a political refugee in Germany, he was murdered, and the case remains unsolved. Many suspect the Islamic Republic had a hand in it.   Farrokhzad isn’t a fictional character – look him up. Indeed, Javaad Alipoor, the creator, director and main spieler in Things Hidden, asks us to get out our phones and go to Wikipedia. He also invites us to Google ‘subalternity’. Are we really confident we can solve this mystery, like the annoying podcast host character (Asha Reid)? How meaningful are the connections and comparisons we’re making? How reliable are our tools? And what do our western-centric processes reveal about ourselves? Farrokhzad, Alipoor pedagogically corrects us, is not like Tom Jones. He is also not like Raam Emami,

Ode to Joy (How Gordon Got to Go to the Nasty Pig Party) is as ecstatically debauched as it sounds. A bass-hole throbbing master stroke of R-rated comedy, a penis de resistance paying tribute to Berlin’s revolutionary hearth of techno – a refuge for the global kink and queer communities – it is laugh-out-loud hilarious for all its frenetically paced sixty minutes. It just might be the fluid-splattered climax of this year’s entire Sydney Festival. Written and directed by James Ley (already confirmed as one of Scotland’s most thrillingly wit-laced commentators), this filthy fairy tale centres gay Scottish public servant Gordon (Lawrence Boothman). Sexually frustrated and spiritually unfulfilled, unwilling to be spooned anymore by ‘Prince Charmings’ in pubs, Gordon’s homonormative life changes forever when he encounters Manpussy (a magnificent kilt-wearing Marc Mackinnon, doubling as our diva narrator) and his partner Cumpig (a jacked Lithium bunny-man in shorts, Sean Connor).  With DJ Simonotron pumping beats from stage left throughout, our fabulous fellowship travels all the way to Berghain’s gay open sex club, SNAX (tagline: ‘Man Meat in Action’) – a vortex to excess, danger, drugs, freedom, and self-discovery. Manpussy will turn into a glorious en-goggled mermaid queen, Cumpig will turn into a pumpkin, and Gordon will turn into the new European Union.  Ley’s writing and all three actors’ performances produce the most wonderful sustained high. Creativity – in costumes, narrat

To paraphrase a line in Oil: “as soon as mankind had the audacity to dream it could keep itself warm when the sun went down, we were at war”. The Earth became an extractive commodity to be fought over; abstract lines sprung up into nation-states; division, jealousy and greed became society’s ever-burning fuel. Colonialism, empire, capitalism, modernity: the same basic impulse to escape cold and darkness rules them all.  In pioneering British playwright Ella Hickson’s ambitious modern play, it also rules a wilful (and often problematic) mother’s love. A time-bending, continent-hopping, multi-layered sci-fi epic and mother-daughter drama, Oil transports (by magical stretch of the imagination) her two main characters from the Industrial Age in Europe when crude oil was discovered, to the oil-rich Middle East at the turn of the century, to nondescript suburbia, and into the future. In each time period, the scene is some manner of dining room, which rests upon a vast mound of blackened soot (Emma White does a brilliant set). Paul Jackson’s lighting is crucial to our perception of what’s going on, and it is fantastic – moving us through greasy pools of waxy candlelight, to thrusting candelabras of boastful brightness, to rainbow fanfares, and to bleached and glaring whites.  ...the grim yet always entertaining adage of Oil has left me in a dark pool of reflection. STC has achieved a commendable feat. Directed with maturity and panache by Paige Rattray (The Lifespan of a Fact, Blith

When the Allies dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima at the end of WWII, the heat of the explosion was so great, it was two times the temperature of the sun’s surface. That potent image – of two suns floating just above the doomed city and its oblivious people – is one of many invoked by Hisashi Inoue’s magical, intensely moving and timeless 1994 play, which is beautifully translated by Roger Pulvers, a friend of the late Inoue. At last premiering in Australia with Omusubi Productions and Red Line Productions, The Face of Jizo is about a father and daughter – one living with survivor’s guilt, the other who didn’t survive – three years after the explosion, in the occupied and devastated city.  The Face of Jizo will always have a modern relevance, though, for as long as humans lose their humanity to war... This is a ghost story, but, in a marked contrast to the haunting of  profound trauma that casts a long shadow over this story, Takezo’s haunting (Shingo Usami) of his 23-year-old daughter Mitsue (Mayu Iwasaki) comes from love.  In fact, like one of the old folk tales that Mitsue tells the children at the library where she works, her father’s spirit begins showing up in her home just when her heart begins to beat again. Despite herself, she is falling for the scholar Kinoshita, a collector of objects touched by the bomb – things like warped bottles, glass shards, and spiked roof tiles.  “When he started to approach the checkout desk, a soft little sigh slipped from your lips,

A clown show and a climate parable in one, with polar bear puppets, malfunctioning stairlifts and huge howling storms – Belgian avant-garde physical theatre show Dimanche has crash-landed at the Playhouse for the Sydney Opera House’s 50th anniversary festival. Over 75 spellbinding minutes, it delivers its unforgettable offering. A collaboration between Company Chaliwaté and Focus, Dimanche has toured several cities before this one, and comes to Sydney directly from the Edinburgh Festival. With dark humour, heart-grinding pathos and piquantly sublime cross-artform ingenuity, it presents a dystopic story series in which man and animal struggle to adapt to a fast-changing world. There is the foolish and intrepid camera crew documenting the melting Arctic, even as it growls like an ancient monster and breaks apart at their feet. There is the even more foolish family, which performs a comically absurd acceptance of their new chaotic and sweltering norms. There is the polar bear and the flamingo (lovingly brought to realistic life by several puppeteers) – creatures that are equally stubborn in their will to endure, and yet wholly innocent.  Real magic happens here. The kind to make you gasp; the kind to make that ‘feeling box’ inside your chest expand outwards with such intensity, it hurts. And, in a subterranean scene that astonishes, there are the tiny fish that nibble at a man asleep at the bottom of the sea. We witness – impossibly – the man’s luminous form floating in the dark

Content warning: This review and this production includes references to family violence and possible sexual abuse.  It’s all fun and games until the perverted child possession starts. Wicked fun and silly games. Then not so silly at all. It behoves me well to mention, though, that this brilliant adaptation of Henry James’ 1898 gothic, dread-ratcheting novella is far more subtle in its suggestion of (coughs lightly) inter-sibling debauchery via depraved ghosts. In fact, the whole story hangs in the crucial and unresolved question of what kind of tale it actually is. Is it a ghost story, where two innocent and impressionable orphans – exposed to a lechery so vile, so diabolical, i.e. hearing a stud valet and bored governess pumping it in the next room – are not just guilelessly modelling this behaviour during playtime, but are actually having their souls invaded by a carnal evil so potent it has risen from the grave?  Or! – and just hear me out on this one – maybe the prudish and pearl-clutching adults in the room are projecting their own paranoias and lived traumas onto two misbehaving little shits? Is this actually a tale of extreme delusion, reality slippage and terrible consequence?  [Hilliar] knows just how and when to turn the screw, tilt the tension, shift the mood, and lay little insinuations throughout. People of the Victorian era (renowned novelist Henry James being one) were obsessed with the idea of innocence and purity, and were very neurotic about preserving it, e

When you walk into Griffin Theatre Company’s tiny wedge of a theatre and lock eyes with the googly eyes of a gigantic pink rocking horse (with what turns out to be a stripper pole/birthing grip impaling its hindquarters), you suspect you’re in for a helluva ride.  Our journey, directed by Anthea Wiliams, indeed leads us through some eye-popping twists and turns until something (an imaginary bub) finally pops out of heroine Hazel’s birth canal. Our first stop: Glebe Library Rhyme Time, when (the very much not-showing) Hazel gatecrashes a new parents’ group run by the improbably named Mrs Twinkle. (Side note: there are more than a few ‘improbables’ in this play, which extend to Nutella-smeared male stripper bums, a midwife with a whistle, and the breaking of not one but two penises during intercourse, on two separate occasions.)  As we travel along, we get to know 37-year-old Hazel as a woman who is self-centred, crass, fun-loving and Below Deck obsessed – and alternately in oblivious denial and high anxiety about what is happening to her, and what the future holds. Perspectives shift and relationships reconfigure – with friends, loved ones, and old selves. Rather than think about ‘what to expect when you’re expecting’ she fixates on things like the name of her friend’s child – FYI, it’s “Reon”. Her mindset seems trapped inside a snippet of one of Mrs Twinkle’s rhymes: “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round...” “Round and round,” Hazel repeats in low and ominous tones throug

“You book a show with the word climate in the title, you are not messing around.” With this wink of a line, delivered early by one of the five actors on stage, the audience chuckles. We’ve begun playfully, relatively placidly. And, in the first of the fifty speculative vignettes that comprise David Finnigan’s intelligent, affecting and deeply human play on the most urgently all-impacting issue of our time, we continue in this mode.  There’s guerilla activism involving SUVs and lentils. An illegal invisible cat. An affable rural grandfather who calls wind turbines “bird slicers”. But Finnigan isn’t messing around either. The son of a climate researcher, a twenty-year ally of experts, even a consultant for the World Bank on disaster risk himself, Finnigan has earned repute as a theatre-maker who puts the Anthropocene on trial. You may remember him for his 2017 play, Kill All Climate Deniers – or for Andrew Bolt turning purple when he learned about its government funding – or the apocalyptic rom-com 44 Sex Acts in One Week.  Finnigan's play...manages to reach into the minds of its audience and create an emotional, practical and shudderingly wide-ranging awareness With Scenes From the Climate Era, debuting in Belvoir’s mainstage season, it’s like Finnigan has taken a dragnet into the imaginations of our world’s scientists and citizens, increasingly saturated with the discourse and chatter of climate change, and cast up an array that – in its entirety – presents a dizzying mosaic

Tooth and Sinew are the local theatre world’s trailblazers of explosively creative derangement. Doomsday clown prophets with a gift for the cleverly profane, their sick genius perverts the tropes of children’s entertainment to tell end-of-world stories about chaos, madness, stupidity and – as in Apocka-wocka-lockalypse – puppets getting tube-fed a full bottle of urine.  Presented like Play School in psychopath mode, and running in the tiny hothouse of Meraki Arts Bar’s third floor theatre, Richard Hilliar’s play is pegged as the “spiritual sequel” to the lurid and majestic grotesquerie that was Ubu – a clownish tale of idiotic power-squabblers in a society on the brink of total collapse. In Apocka, we’re well past the brink: beyond the heavy locked door of a bunker called ‘Haven’, located somewhere in the deadlands of Parramatta, there are only dust storms, marauding tribes and death.  Hilliar’s plays really lean into nightmarish excess and puerility – simultaneously speaking to our little kiddy brains and our primitive, lecherous id Miss Melissa (a wonderfully unhinged Nicole Wineberg) is our surviving human: an overalls-wearing woman of bright smiles and the honey-toned coo of a preschool teacher. Founder of Haven, she awaits the return of the ‘Last Chance Plane’ – a mythical aircraft which will find them and take them away to wherever the rich people went when the world began to burn. Schnerk, Titzi, Blerkina and Gorbo are our surviving monsters (puppets made by Ash Bell,

In one unassuming corner of Sydney’s corporate high-end Barangaroo, a temporary portal to a strange and fantastical realm has materialised. It holds its curious tear in the everyday order through the Department of Legend and Myth; a new bar filled with cocktails, magic and quirky decor, now serving as the threshold extension to the mystery world that lies within. Take a tipple from the bar under neon pink clouds, become pleasantly unmoored from your day with a resident DJ’s serene poppy beats, and then, your journey begins. And oh, how it unfolds is up to you. Eternityland is Sydney’s newest large-scale immersive theatre adventure, brought to us from Danielle Harvey, the director of the acclaimed A Midnight Visit (another production to score an elusive four-stars from us). Where A Midnight Visit was concocted from the life and legacy of Edgar Allan Poe, spuming gothic madness and morbid hysteria, Eternityland is a delirium populated by the idea of the hero: a figure variously mad, noble, tragic, triumphant, misunderstood, overlooked and absurd. It is a vast delirium of many vaults and chambers, with a dizzying two storeys and twenty rooms drenched with Eternityland’s electric, acid-popping dream. Each is more bizarre and captivating than the last, and each invites the curious to explore its secrets and activate its pleasures. Within these rooms, strangely clad warriors, kings, and feminist badasses enchant us with their skills (from circus and cabaret, to music and storytelli

Fantastically crass, incestuous and obscene, Ubu is a riotous, lurid, shrieking clownfare of violent stupidity. A flatulent farce of the doggedly lowest moral decency and the highest entertainment, this X-rated kid’s show has puppetry and poo, clashing Georgian-era costumes and cardboard crowns, nupty princelings and mad rebel kings, koala skins as torture bags and mass annihilation. It is against taste, against maturity and against the kind of earnest political theatre that tries to appeal to reason.  It is the spectacular triumph of the fool. And it satirises that tall order of our time that we literally cannot escape from – in our future, news, discourse, media, ethics and daily life – however much we try. That is, the nearing apocalypse of climate change. Richard Hilliar’s perverted fairy tale is set in Pooland. Yes, Pooland. Where Poolish people live and poop. The tremendously moronic, shit-sniffing brute Pa Ubu – once the royal champion – has been manipulated by the allegorical figures of government (Fuller Bjullschitt), media (Ms Information) and science (Dr Murray Faseema) to overthrow the King, who has become a little concerned about the ‘Overheating’ that is seeing the land burn, flood and desecrate of life. The slovenly Ma Ubu is his Lady Macbeth, a cunning mind in a misogynist realm.  The coup is a success and, for a while, the greedy live large. But the riches for the few under the reign under King Ubu can’t last long. Meanwhile, the limp-wristed survivor of the

For a little over an hour, on the night of the federal election, we all put away our phones and stopped refreshing the #auspol Twitter feed. Somewhere in the middle of that hour, the election result would be called. Possibly during a joke about the likelihood of Greta Thunberg double-bagging a dildo. We’d all come out of that little Newtown comedy bar temporarily rinsed from political discourse, and ready for a post-Scomo world. Bec Melrose was our happenstance bespectacled midwife into the new Australia. A well-known name on the Sydney comedy circuit, she’s opened for Wil Anderson, written for shows like Gruen and Question Everything, and won the 2018 RAW Comedy award. Her new show Wildflower – fittingly debuting in Enmore Theatre’s Wildflower bar – is a rather lovely, eclectic and occasionally laugh-out-loud amble through her distracted yet sharp-witted mind, which she herself has only recently come to understand a little better. Because she is "not an eight-year-old boy", and because of a sexist medical industry which fails to recognise how conditions present differently among genders, Bec learned pretty late in life that she has ADHD. Now in her thirties, it makes a lot of sense. Occasionally checking her notes ("if you’re judging me, it’s discrimination," she quips), and embellished with PowerPoint slides, she opens up about what having ADHD has meant, before and after diagnosis, to herself and to others. The Guatemalan worry dolls her parents gave her, for instance. Wh