Five Sydney Theatre Shows to Shake Up Your May
Autumn is the perfect time to see theatre in Sydney — so pick the shows folks are talking about.
Five Sydney Theatre Shows to Shake Up Your May
Autumn is the perfect time to see theatre in Sydney — so pick the shows folks are talking about.
A post-apocalyptic, three-part journey inspired by The Simpsons. A provocative Indigenous rom-com. A ham funeral. Autumn wields quite a hefty stash of theatre for Sydneysiders, so we've picked the shows you should focus your attention on. Some are made to make you chortle, others are downright disturbing, and they're the best on stage this month.
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At a train station in India, a young girl begins to sing while a man watches, rapt. He is a tea seller, but no one seems to notice the small stall where he brews chai. He begins to tell a story — an Indian fairy tale. The station is crowded, but the stage contains only one performer.
Guru of Chai is the latest work by New Zealand theatre company Indian Inks. Jacob Rajan performs the show solo, adopting seventeen different characters and a good deal of shadow puppetry to tell the tale of seven daughters plotted against by their stepmother.
This one’s been doing the rounds for a few years now and picking up glowing reviews all along the way. Diving through layers of truth narrative and style, Guru of Chai is pure storytelling and by all accounts a completely transporting experience.
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New York, the 1960s. Sister Aloysius is a hard-bitten nun and principal of the St. Nicholas Church school. When she suspects Father Flynn, the parish priest of abusing a student, her pursuit of the truth is fearsome and unflinching. Flynn protests his innocence, but Aloysius is a scalpel in search of a jugular. As she tightens her grip, she begins to question not only her beliefs, but the institution she’s served her whole life.
Best known as a film adaptation starring Meryl Streep and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, John Patrick Shanley’s Catholic paranoia party Doubt took the 2005 Pullitzer Prize for Drama as well as a Tony Award for Best Play. Shanley’s script is precise and cold, the scenes brisk as the Bronx winter setting. This is a text steeped in bitterness and suspicion — the characters twisted and the ground frozen. Think on your sins before booking for this one.
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Though the world is obviously crying out for a play about a mausoleum brimming with leftover Christmas meat or a family grieving the death of a terrible actor, Australia’s only Nobel laureate for literature did not see fit to furnish us with such a literally-titled masterpiece. It doesn’t make the final product any less weird, though.
Written in 1948, White’s work traces the story of a young poet and the increasingly odd relationship he shares with his landlady, Mrs. Lusty after her husband dies suddenly. The result is a spirited, if unsettling pursuit of a young man by a grief-stricken, libidinous retiree, through a lavish post-funeral feast.
The play was apparently inspired by a painting called The Dead Landlord, which William Dobell painted shortly after helping his own landlady heft her husband’s corpse onto a bed. Infamously rejected by the Adelaide Festival in 1962, Griffin theatre and director and producer Kate Gaul have no such qualms.
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Nakkiah Lui’s new comedy could be a riff on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Charlotte Gibson is a lawyer and going places, fast. Her parents are stoked, but they don’t know that Charlotte’s also procured herself a fiancée. He’s white and unemployed, a composer. His upper-middle-class parents are at the stuffier end of conservative and they’re headed over for Christmas dinner.
But Lui says the idea came from somewhere else entirely. “I just wanted to write something for Aboriginal actors that didn’t have death in it. I wanted to write something that didn’t come from a place of sorrow… This was actually something that had hope, that had happiness in it.”
Director Paige Rattray has the helm for this one with a cast that includes Shari Sebbens, Luke Carroll and Geoff Morrell. Christmas may be over half a year away, but if Lui’s other work is anything to go by, there’ll be enough cheer in Black is the New White to stave off the encroaching winter.
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Huddled around a fire, the apocalypse still fresh in their memories, a small band of survivors amuse themselves by acting out an episode of The Simpsons. Seven years later, the band are a travelling troupe, performing the episode for each outpost they pass through. A generation later, the episode has achieved almost mythical status, the story — a spoof of Cape Fear — a beacon, an example and a comfort to the people who have fashioned humanity’s rubble into a primitive society.
Back in the day, it was said that Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov contained the sum of all human experience. Come the 21st century, Matt Groening’s pop culture behemoth is the proud usurper of that throne. Anne Washburn’s play advances this argument one step further — elevating the show above the role of mass entertainer to that of a vital common language for humanity’s devastated survivors.
So, there’s all that. But, to be honest, it also just sounds really freaking enjoyable.
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