Cirrus@Austlit

'The 1995 debut novel from Christos Tsiolkas (The Slap, Dead Europe, Barracuda) makes its mainstage premiere 25 years after the fact.

'Ari (Roy Joseph, Five Bedrooms) is 19, unemployed and aimless. He doesn’t want to be gay. He doesn’t want to be Greek. He doesn’t want to be anything. He finds an escape, of sorts, via sex, drugs and dance clubs. But, he doesn’t really fit in with the queens at The Peel any better than with family in his theía’s backyard.

'This is the story that established Tsiolkas as a provocative master of the written word. Adapted for film in the 1998 underground hit Head On, and now, in close collaboration with playwright Dan Giovannoni, Tsiolkas rewrites Ari’s odyssey for the stage with a 21st century perspective.'

Source: Matlhouse Theatre.

'Meet Barbara and her band the Camp Dogs. Barbara’s been trying to make it in Sydney but maybe this just isn’t her town. In all the relentless demands of city life, where’s the sense of belonging she craves? It’s time to take a break with her cousin René.

With Ursula Yovich as Barbara and Casey Donovan as her redoubtable cousin, Barbara and the Camp Dogs is a rock-gig musical about love and home.' (Production summary)

'In an isolated farmhouse, outside a small country town – a woman and her daughters have just killed their abusive man of the house. Known throughout the district as a cur and a dog, the women set about disposing of his body. However their task becomes fraught when several of the local villagers choose to pay a visit and grow suspicious at their behaviour – will their act become exposed before they can dispose of the body? A lyrical exploration of family, violence and revenge against a backdrop of a brutal, rural Australian landscape.' (Play summary)

'After 18 years on death row, Marvin Lee Wilson was executed by lethal injection. But after a 2002 Supreme Court ruling, his sub-normal IQ should have disqualified him from the death sentence. Strapped to a gurney, his final statement was a plea for recognition: ‘I am a miracle’.

'Taking these words as a point of departure, playwright Declan Greene meets Wilson’s story with a work of monumental scope, spanning three continents and two hundred and forty years. In an 18th Century slave colony, a soldier is sent upriver on a suicide mission. In present-day Melbourne, a man finds himself entrapped by his carer. In Huntsville, Texas, a prisoner awaits his death. And somewhere beyond time and history, a sublime force lays a plan to rewrite the future.

'Set to a transcendent choral score, I Am a Miracle depicts a world bound to the injustices of the past – crying out for intervention. Wildly careening between the epic and the intimate, this is a mind-expanding theatrical experience / determined to change the course of history.' (Publication summary)

“I go, running, downstair, outside, go past a well and past Ugo house. All way until the village it nearly sop. Poi lo sento. Under the ground. Un brontolio.”

'Kaja fled war-torn Belgrade in the 1990s; arriving in Australia felt like coming to paradise. Ralph and Sara left Tuscany in the 1950s as part of the ‘populate or perish’ scheme and built a new life in Melbourne.

Now working as an interpreter, Kaja is called to a hospital one night to help a young man reconnect with his grandfather.

Developed during his time as Resident Writer at Red Stitch, with Dramaturge Gary Abrahams, Dan Giovanonni’s magical new play, Jurassica, weaves the past and present together, exploring what it is to migrate, to be displaced and to spend the rest of your life searching for home.' (Production summary)

'Bringing together the country's finest creative talents including Tom E. Lewis (The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith) and Jimi Bani (Mabo) this majestic and physical reworking of Shakespeare's King Lear employs the timeless tragedy to speak to the history and current circumstances of Indigenous Australia. Working across cultures and generations, The Shadow King is unmissable theatre of a scale and significance to match the land upon which it is made.'

Source: www.malthousetheatre.com.au (Sighted 12/09/2012).