Kate Prendergast

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

After a smash-hit 2022 run, Cameron James is bringing back his Electric Dreams for one night only at Sydney Comedy Festival. It hits the Factory Theatre on Saturday, May 6 at 9.15pm. Snap up your tickets over here and read on for our four-star review: We zoom in on a finger skateboard, and then pan down to Shrek’s big throbbing dick. Switch to a photo of an intensely serious teen Cameron James holding up an iPod, then glide to the Jackass boys. Microsoft Word Art ripples across the screen, over Nelly albums, Matrix DVDs, Napster screens and scanned Kodaks. Rage Against the Machine is playing. The Oogachacka Baby dances.The show hasn’t even begun and we’re already roiling in sweaty waves of noughtiesnostalgia. In the audience, the glands of all the millennials opened up to release the stank of long-gone youth. This mood-setting PowerPoint, and the show to follow, is Cameron James’ hilarious, humiliation-rich tribute to those mid-teen years, and to the young, earnest cringe-lord and Battle of the Bands champion he was.Back then, see, all he ever wanted to be is a rockstar. Just like his hero, Daniel Johns, leadsinger of Silverchair and a Newcastlian like him. He’d built his whole identity around makingit through music. But then something happened (something pretty graphic and relating toFight Club), and he was forced to abandon that dream for good. Decades later, after discovering his old spiral-bound song books during a visit home, James is picking up his guitar and paying hon

Improv is for losers. It’s the lamest form of comedy. It even incorporates mime, the cringiest of performance art forms. No bloody thanks.This was my attitude towards improv before I saw the Bear Pack. Now, I’m a convert. Of the most zealous kind. Let me slow my hot little breaths of excitement and evangelise – the Bear Pack is the most joyfully exhilarating, spiritually euphoric, and creatively hilarious comedy show I have ever seen. It’s like if your imagination had an hour-long orgasm. And because improv is improv, every show is different. I’ve seen the Bear Pack five times, and the first show I saw was only in 2019 (which I reluctantly went to on a Bumble date). I hope to see many more. I must.I promise, go just once and you will also join the cult. Steen Raskopoulos (who you may recognise in a cameo role in Katherine Ryan’s Netflix series The Duchess) and Carlo Ritchie (a writer for Play School with Honours in Linguistics) are the brothers-in-anarchy who brought me into the light. Springboarding from a few audience suggestions, these quick-witted conjurers spin a whole crazy universe and demented yarn into being, leaping between characters and pirouetting between scenes – they bring us equine uprisings and Poseidon showdowns, mountain prophecies and sibling treacheries, troll evictions and roller derby reunions. It’s epically silly.That’s not to say the universe they’ve created is stable. Not at all. The whole thing wobbles with a wild and volatile drunkenness, at any mo

Does her first date still wear gloves during sex? Are gynaecologists clairvoyant on matters of mental health when staring up a vag? And where, oh where, have Big Aussie Things hidden the Big Poo? Her therapist might not have called Thalia-Joan back when she said she was going to use him in her show. But never mind. Her first Zoom session with Michael (that’s his name, Michael) is the journey we are all privileged, and perhaps a little unnerved, to re-live. “Lock the doors,” she deadpans at the start, then laughs gaily. With the consummately relaxed self-assurance of the comic doyenne, Thalia-Joan proceeds through an emotional dumpage of personal traumas and dysfunctions, sometimes accompanied by PowerPoint slides, and self-indulged with just one rap number. Long-sleeved and vested above yellow plaid pants, tiny plastic hair clips holding back her hair, she looks as though she has just breezed in from one of Australian Fashion Week’s more eclectic label catwalks taking place a couple of suburbs over this week. The presentation is a wonderful match for her comedic style – bold, a little chaotic yet under some mysterious gestalt, surprisingly appealing. There is madness here, but it is magnificently maintained. Thalia-Joan is the queen of the high-functioning unhinged, an artiste in oversharing. So calmly acquainted with the blitzkrieg of barmy that can sometimes be her life on the precipice of thirty, she’s able to groom her mania, slap it on its flanks with a lazy hand and