Monthly Archives: February 2012

Robin Usher
The Age
28/02/2012

See the article in its original context here.

The Bard’s famous love story gets an all-female rewrite

SHAKESPEARE’S Juliet is one of drama’s most famous characters but she is seldom considered a solo character divorced from Romeo, her famous lover.

Zoey Dawson is out to change that with a contemporary, all-female production of Romeo and Juliet, featuring some of Melbourne’s finest young actors.

”I want to reconfigure the play with Juliet in the centre of it,” she says. ”Most of Shakespeare’s important characters are male but this is really her story – Juliet has the strongest dramatic arc. She is the one asking the questions and has the big monologues. She is like Hamlet because everything depends on what she does – when Romeo is banished he sits on the floor and cries.”

The Age
Kathy Evans
24/2/2012

Innovative arts venue fortyfivedownstairs celebrates its first decade.

JULIAN Burnside QC, once harboured “foolish fantasies” about becoming a photographer before changing his mind at the last minute. But he still carries a torch for artists whose creative expression, he believes, makes our lives more bearable: “Without law you can’t have society, but without art you can’t have civilisation.”

Annemarie Peard reviews Two by Two for Aussie Theatre.  See the review in its original context here.

As it’s Saint Valentine’s Day week, it’s a commercial glut of glittery hearts and factory roses as we’re told to face the future as the gods intended: as a wholesome twosome. Blah to that; celebrate instead by going to fortyfive downstairs to see Little One’s Theatre’s Two by Two.

It’s raining; it’s been raining for so long that Carl (Gary Abrahams) and Jack (Paul Blenheim) can see the huge boat from their high-rise city apartment window. Jack’s packing supplies and listening to the radio for unlikely evacuation news. As a painter, Jack’s ticket to board is at the end of the queue, but Carl’s a doctor – someone with useful post-ammageddon skills. Both know why they’re not staring in this episode of The Love Boat, especially as their boy/girl couple neighbours went days ago. But there’s hope when Duckie (Zahra Newman), a patient of Carl’s, turns up with a baby and is desperate to board.

Darkly funny and unexpectedly confronting, Two by Two was developed at NIDA and won the 2011 Malcolm Robertson Prize (for awesome writing).

Karen Coombs reviews Two by Two for Stage Whispers.  See the review in its original context here.

Noah’s Ark is a biblical story that at times is depicted as a charming tale of God’s creatures walking two by two into the safety of an enormous ark. At its crux, though, is an apocalyptic event of a grieving God about to destroy his creation with world-wide deluge – only one family, and one male and female of every living creature are saved.

Two by Two, the winner of the Malcolm Robertson Prize in 2011, transports this ancient story into the 21st century, a futuristic Melbourne that is facing the potential end-of-the-world due to torrential rain and the threat of the dams about to rupture.