Sydney Lyric, October 17 The ’50s had only roared off to rock’n’roll Valhalla a dozen years earlier when Grease first appeared: just the right time-lapse for a spot of nostalgia. Now the ’50s are a fading memory for some and a planet full of aliens for others, so Grease must thrive or dive without the […]

The Stables, October 19 For all the benign serenity of its title John Romerils’s play seethes with the inevitability of its apocalyptic finale. This eight-page monologue delivered by Les Harding is an open wound for the actor to gouge and inflame. Peter Kowitz’s delivery of the speech is so potent and affecting that you lean […]

Belvoir Street, October 16 Accepted scholarship has it that about a decade before he wrote Hamlet Shakespeare had written another play of that name, now lost. This, predating his known plays, was a crude revenge tragedy that supposedly influenced Thomas Kyd’s hideous The Spanish Tragedy. The plot of Hamlet (borrowed from elsewhere) was already in […]