Few of us have been untouched by mental illness, directly or indirectly, which partly accounts for the success of London-based Australian playwright Kendall Feaver’s debut work. Premiering in Manchester in 2018, when it won the UK Theatre Award for Best New Play – one of several accolades – The Almighty Sometimes has been presented by companies around the world including Queensland Theatre and Sydney’s Griffin Theatre. So, one could say this MTC production is overdue. However, director Hannah Goodwin’s focused, sensitive interpretation and the fine cast, particularly Nadine Garner and Max McKe ..read more

“It’s not the end of the world,” sings The Girl in Tell Me On A Sunday, as she picks herself up after another failed relationship and prepares to start anew. As performed here by the luminous Erin Clare, your heart goes out to her. Erin Clare in Tell Me On A Sunday, Hayes Theatre Co, 2024. Photo © John McRae The bittersweet one-woman song cycle, featuring music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Don Black (who subsequently co-wrote the book and lyrics for Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard), first saw the light of day at the Sydmonton Festival – held on the grounds of Lloyd Webber’s country e ..read more

In 1943, a group of refugee aliens – most of them ‘Dunera Boys’ – created and performed a revue titled Sergeant Snow White at the Union Repertory Theatre at the University of Melbourne. This year, on its 81st anniversary, the University of Sydney’s Ian Maxwell, chair of Theatre and Performance Studies, has recreated the show with its original script and a cast of student actors for showings in Belvoir’s Downstairs Theatre. “This project investigates, in and through performance practice, this extraordinary work, the circumstances in which it was created, and its complex – and overlooked– l ..read more

It’s not a spoiler to say that by the end of Red Stitch’s arresting new staging of Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God, there is a pamphlet for a mortgage broker floating in pitch black water onstage. It’s the perfect symbol for the play, which often finds near-divine (though never explicitly religious) meaning in the everyday, seemingly banal things that make a life. We begin the show in the middle of what is perhaps the most banal thing: a meeting with a mortgage broker. The recently divorced, blue-collar Ryan (Darcy Kent) is trying to secure a loan for a 12-acre piece of land ..read more

We seldom see Thomas Bernhard’s play performed on the Australian stage. In 35 years of fairly hardcore theatre going, this is only the third play by one of the most important writers in the 20th-century Germanosphere I’ve seen. The second was an STC production of The Histrionic, back in 2012. The first, Force of Habit, directed by Jean-Pierre Mignon for Anthill Theatre in Melbourne in 1993, featured Julie Forsyth, who is (fun fact) also in this production. We shouldn’t be surprised. Like his German language contemporaries Peter Handke and Botho Strauss, Bernhard (who died in 1989) is, in box o ..read more

Don’t expect to come out of this production with your faith (or otherwise) in a Higher Power shifted one way or the other. But you can be reasonably sure that you will emerge in some way moved. Anthony Gooley and Elijah Williams in A Case for the Existence of God. Photo © Phil Erbacher Samuel D. Hunter’s single set play opens in an office cubicle in Twin Falls, Idaho, where two men have come together to talk over a mortgage. The hopeful applicant is Ryan (played by Anthony Gooley), the recently separated dad of a toddler daughter. He’s hoping to buy a remnant of the land on which his forebea ..read more

Australian actor Sarah Snook is among the winners in the 2024 Olivier Awards, staged in London last night in a ceremony hosted by actor Hannah Waddingham. Receiving the award for Best Actress, Snook’s win is yet another feather in the cap for the Kip Williams-directed Sydney Theatre Company production The Picture of Dorian Gray, now playing on the West End until 11 May. The production also earned a Mithridate Award for Best Costume Design for Marg Horwell. On receiving the award, Snook said: “It’s an incredible honour to be on the stage in the West End and this is not something that I thought ..read more

Longtime housemates Amaliah and Kaveh are a couple in some ways, not so much in others. She’s a Pakistan-born singer and actor trying to extend her residency in Australia. He’s a gay Kabul-born doctor, now an Australian citizen. Antony Makhlouf and Almitra Mavalvala in For the Love of Paper. Photo © LSH Media With a possible deportation, looming, they decide to suppress their ethical concerns, ignore suggestions from parents in their countries of birth (where Kaveh, understandably, has yet to come out) and enter the bureaucratic maze as a couple in the hope that Amaliah can also gain citizen ..read more

Traditionally the “merry month” in the northern hemisphere, May is very much the “busy month” here in Australia. The May edition of Limelight is proof of it. This month’s cover image features a production shot from Tosca, directed by Edward Dick for Opera North in the UK. Opera Australia presents the production in Melbourne this month and at the Sydney Opera House between June and August. Photo © James Glossop It’s 100 years since Giacomo Puccini died after suffering a heart attack aged 65 in 1924. His music lives on however – and as strongly as it ever did, despite the various criticisms le ..read more

The 41st annual Green Room Awards were presented in a ceremony held at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre on Monday evening. Melbourne Theatre Company took away awards for six of its 2023 productions, with Patricia Cornelius’s play My Sister Jill recognised with awards for Outstanding Production, Outstanding Ensemble, Direction (Susie Dee) and Outstanding Lighting Design (Rachel Burke). Melbourne Theatre Company’s My Sister Jill. Photo © Sarah Walker MTC’s Bernhardt/Hamlet was awarded Outstanding Costume Design (Marg Horwell), Declan Furber Gillick’s Jacky collected the Outstanding New Australian Wr ..read more