Things to do in Sydney today

Director Iain Sinclair has had plenty of success with Arthur Miller's 1950s Brooklyn masterpiece. He first directed the play for the Old Fitz Theatre in 2017 and picked up four Sydney Theatre Awards, including Best Independent Production. He was then invited to create a new production for Melbourne Theatre Company earlier this year, which was met with rave reviews. Now he's bringing the show to the Ensemble Theatre, with several members of the original Sydney cast, including Helpmann nominee Zoe Terakes and Janine Watson. Anthony Gooley takes over the lead role of Eddie Carbone from Ivan Donato. The gripping play takes place in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, where a family of migrants is almost torn apart when two cousins from Italy come to stay and work illegally. Sinclair's production strips the story back to its bare minimum and ramps up the drama.

You might know this one: during an undefined wartime, a plane carrying evacuated schoolboys crashes onto an island. There are no adults left standing. The surviving children, mostly boisterous and bold, set about forming their own society. Unchecked, that society quickly devolves into something brutal. The quieter, gentler boys should beware. The story, of course, is Lord of the Flies. It began life as William Golding’s 1954 novel, on school reading lists near constantly; it was adapted into the 1963 Peter Brook film; and it was parodied, of course, in an episode of The Simpsons called ‘Das Bus’. Even if you don’t know the book, you’re probably familiar with the ideas it represents: the tension between human civilisation and animal instinct. Adapted for the stage by Nigel Williams in 1996, that script is now being directed by Sydney Theatre Company artistic director Kip Williams. It’s a blunt instrument of a play that could set your heart racing. The biggest, brightest light in Williams’ production is the cast. It’s been assembled in a way that all shows should be: it’s openly diverse across intersections of gender, race and ability. There are no white, cisgender, able-bodied men in sight and that’s intentional. It’s exciting to see a show at the Roslyn Packer Theatre that’s bursting with young actors making their Sydney Theatre Company debut, and the company is packed with some of our best emerging artists: Joseph Althouse, Justin Amankwah, Nyx Calder, Yerin Ha, Daniel Mon

There are plays about families that are designed to envelop you with the sinking feeling of upper-middle-class malaise. There are plays about families that want to shock you with hidden secrets. There are plays about families disintegrating, reconnecting, struggling and striving. Some of Australia’s best plays take the family unit and explore it with tenderness and honesty but without compromise, and while they’re at it, they reflect something about the truth of ourselves as a community and as a country. City of Gold, the debut play by actor Meyne Wyatt, is one of those plays.  Breythe (Wyatt) is an actor about to walk off the set of an Australia Day lamb commercial. The ad, for all its message of unity, is plainly white-centred and racist, and just as Breythe is telling his white co-worker in full Captain Cook garb that he should speak up about it too, he gets a sign in the form of a willie wagtail and a phone call from home. His father (Maitland Schnaars) has died.  So Breythe leaves Sydney and heads back to Kalgoorlie, where his family – sister Carina (Shari Sebbens), brother Mateo (Mathew Cooper) and cousin Cliffhanger (Jeremy Ambrum) are trying in their own ways to hold themselves together. But in a town where peaceful protests by the Indigenous community leads to police attacks in riot gear and white residents both threatening and enacting racial violence (which really could be any community in Australia), just being able to grieve – and pursue a wrongful death case f

Some musicals are indestructible. The list isn’t that long, but Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein’s 1957 masterpiece is certainly near the top. The Romeo and Juliet-inspired story of two warring gangs – one Puerto Rican, the other kids of white immigrants – on the streets of New York has pretty much everything going for it: a tragic love story, electrifying dance numbers, and a score of near-impossible richness that melds its jazz and operatic influences effortlessly. The production of West Side Story currently playing at the Sydney Opera House – directed by American Joey McKneely and featuring a young Australian cast – proves that indestructibility. It’s a production mired with problems that would bring lesser material unstuck. As it stands, it’s a satisfying night of theatre, but nowhere near as gripping and moving as it could be. Let’s start with what works: this production uses Jerome Robbins’ original Broadway choreography, which remains some of the most distinctive dance ever created for musical theatre. Audiences might have seen it all before, but it’s danced gorgeously here, with extraordinary precision, every leap and dramatic finger click executed perfectly. Unfortunately the set, designed by Paul Gallis, seems ill-fitted to the Joan Sutherland Theatre and hems the performers in. Frequently, they’re dancing under and around metal fire escapes, when they should be soaring across open streets and playgrounds. Only in the dance at the gym does t

Sofie (Eloise Snape) and Gregor (Graeme McRae) used to have a cat named Wink. Then Gregor skinned the cat and buried him in the backyard. Sofie and Gregor are unhappily married, so they see a psychiatrist, Dr Frans (Matthew Cheetham). He encourages the couple at their regular, separate appointments to slam their feelings down. But he’s understandably lost for words when a freshly-skinned Wink (Sam O’Sullivan) shows up for a session. Suddenly all those repressed thoughts, feelings and desires come surging right back up to the surface, and no one – not Sofie, not Gregor, not Frans – knows what to do about it.  And Wink? He’s just going to do whatever he wants. He’s a cat. It’s what they do. Wink is the work of Jen Silverman, an American playwright whose dark comedies have a lot of buzz in US theatre circles; she was also a writer on Netflix’s 2018 take on Tales of the City. Silverman applies a queer lens to life in her work, and Wink approaches the frustrations of life through a queer approach to narrative: what are we all hiding about who we really are? What is the cost of transforming into something that doesn’t make us “murderously sad,” and can the structures of our lives survive this transformation? At Kings Cross Theatre, however, the drama is mostly played straight. Directed by Anthony Skuse with a naturalistic hand, the production swirls like uneasy oil against water. The script is sharper on the page than it is here realised onstage; the more surreal elements of th

The truth can be hard to face at the best of times, but what about when a new discovery shakes one of our fundamental beliefs? What if that belief also underpins our society’s most significant power structures?  That’s exactly what led to the Galileo affair, in which the now revered scientist found himself in deep trouble with the Catholic church for his support of heliocentrism: the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun, and is not, as was accepted at the time, the centre of the universe. Galileo was under enormous pressure to shut up, and it wasn’t until a century later that the church finally eased up on its opposition to the theory. Which raises the question: if it took us that long to acknowledge that the world revolves around the sun, how long will it take us to acknowledge that our actions are now quickly making it uninhabitable? Galileo had the proof, and so do our scientists. It’s this fascinating chapter of history that Bertolt Brecht turned into a play in 1938 while in exile from Germany, and then revised three times in the years leading up to 1955. What was a pertinent subject when propaganda was obscuring basic truths and unleashing horrors into the world is perhaps an even more pertinent subject now that propaganda is… well, obscuring basic truths and unleashing horrors into the world. Tom Wright, who has a history of adapting Brecht’s work for contemporary Australian audiences (his version of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui was ferociously good), has

There are plays about families that are designed to envelop you with the sinking feeling of upper-middle-class malaise. There are plays about families that want to shock you with hidden secrets. There are plays about families disintegrating, reconnecting, struggling and striving. Some of Australia’s best plays take the family unit and explore it with tenderness and honesty but without compromise, and while they’re at it, they reflect something about the truth of ourselves as a community and as a country. City of Gold, the debut play by actor Meyne Wyatt, is one of those plays.  Breythe (Wyatt) is an actor about to walk off the set of an Australia Day lamb commercial. The ad, for all its message of unity, is plainly white-centred and racist, and just as Breythe is telling his white co-worker in full Captain Cook garb that he should speak up about it too, he gets a sign in the form of a willie wagtail and a phone call from home. His father (Maitland Schnaars) has died.  So Breythe leaves Sydney and heads back to Kalgoorlie, where his family – sister Carina (Shari Sebbens), brother Mateo (Mathew Cooper) and cousin Cliffhanger (Jeremy Ambrum) are trying in their own ways to hold themselves together. But in a town where peaceful protests by the Indigenous community leads to police attacks in riot gear and white residents both threatening and enacting racial violence (which really could be any community in Australia), just being able to grieve – and pursue a wrongful death case f