Cirrus@Austlit

''Lally Katz is a playwright with a lot of talent and some quantity of unevenness. In the past few years we’ve seen the talent shine. In 2014, Neighbourhood Watch, starring Robyn Nevin and directed by Simon Stone, was an ambitious, not entirely co-ordinated play, but it was rich enough to allow Nevin to give one of the performances of her life: wonderfully funny and deeply moving at the same time. And Stone’s direction worked to give it constant colour and movement. You long for both Nevin and Stone in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s half-baked production of Katz’s new and very talented play Minnie & Liraz, and maybe for Miriam Margolyes as well, who did Neighbourhood Watch in Adelaide. This, though, is a bit unfair on Nancye Hayes and Sue Jones, who do all they can and more, as does Rhys McConnochie, in the face of Anne-Louise Sarks’s raw, drab and hapless production. Even the blocking stumbles so that you feel the director is way out of her depth and a promising play with a fair dash of Katz’s natural sparkle and buoyancy is being diminished by a controlling intelligence with no feeling for this kind of theatre. Everything is featureless and ugly. One of the roles is execrably performed, while another is a long way from excellent, though through all of this you feel the energy of Katz’s talent even if it’s constantly battling with her vulgarity and lapses of taste.' (Introduction)

'A year after bushfire devastated the small mountainside town where she grew up, Annie leaves her city life and strained marriage and returns with her young daughter, Pip, to the scene of the destruction. Annie clearly isn’t coping with the lingering effects of the traumatic fire, which happened while she and Pip were staying at Annie’s childhood home, and which claimed the lives of many in the community. It quickly becomes clear that everyone who lived through it, including Annie’s mother and uncle, is similarly struggling to move on, expressing their trauma in myriad idiosyncratic ways. '

'Australian coastal Gothic coming-of-age novels are perennially popular with readers and they come with a number of conventions. Ben Hobson’s debut, To Become a Whale, taps all of them neatly. It’s set in 1961, in coastal Queensland. Our sensitive, gentle, vulnerable protagonist is 13-year-old Sam Keogh, who’s too anxious to play football but good at school. At the beginning of the novel, Sam’s loving mother dies of an illness, leaving him reeling. He’s left in the care of his father, the man in turmoil. Walter is a cold, disagreeable and frequently cruel short man with missing fingers who was rarely home during Sam’s childhood because he works at the Moreton Island whaling station as a flenser for months on end, during the season. When his wife dies, Walter takes Sam away from everything he knows – their house, his grandparents and school – initially to a piece of vacant land closer to the water, where Walter plans to build and start again. ' (Introduction)