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The Latest Breaking News from Pia Johnson

The West Gate Bridge disaster looms large over Melbourne. A new play can’t fully capture its grief

Every Melburnian knows the West Gate Bridge, crossing the Yarra River north of its exit to Port Phillip Bay. It looms, it hums, it holds memory, it writhes.

The Conversation

Jean Tong’s Do Not Pass Go is Kafka for the modern corporate age

In the shadow of Franz Kafka’s visionary dystopian fiction, the faceless, hierarchical machinery of bureaucracy has long served as a symbol of quiet, grinding despair. Kafka’s institutions are at once impenetrable and absurd, systems that trap individuals in a perpetual tension between resignation and the faint, flickering hope of change.

The Conversation

A love letter to Country: grief, motherhood and loss in Jada Alberts’ Black Light

This story oscillates and swells around a glass outdoor table, on the porch of a family home on Larrakia land. A table almost identical to the one on my porch back home. I point this out to my sis as the bubbling opening night crowd pours into the Merlyn Theatre,…

The Conversation

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A stage adaptation of Dying: A Memoir asks the big questions about death – but ends up strangely unmoving

What makes a good death? Quietly surrounded by friends and family or going out in a flash of blazing glory (whatever that means)?

The Conversation

New adaptation of Rebecca is visually haunting, but misses the core tensions of the original story

Melbourne Theatre Company’s (MTC) latest offering is a striking adaptation of the 1938 gothic novel Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.

The Conversation

Destiny is a fierce new stage show exploring love, loss and rebellion under the shadow of apartheid South Africa

Award-winning playwright and actor Kristy Marillier’s new work, Destiny, is an ensemble drama set in 1976 South Africa, against a backdrop of rising resistance to the apartheid regime.

The Conversation

‘What 'are’ we going to do about the orchard?‘ Pony Cam takes on Chekhov classic for Malthouse debut

Pony Cam makes its mainstage debut at Malthouse Theatre with The Orchard, an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s classic.

The Conversation

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Vivid, thrilling and ghastly: new theatrical adaptation of The Birds evokes climate disaster, terrorism and lockdown

Malthouse’s new production of The Birds is a thrillingly realised take on the 1952 short story by Daphne Du Maurier. Adapted by Louise Fox and directed by Matthew Lutton, this vivid realisation is a chilling treatise on fear and resilience in the face of an external threat.

The Conversation

Grief, strength and resistance: The Black Woman of Gippsland is a powerful reckoning with colonial myths

A woman is tossed ashore, bedraggled and alone. She is believed to be a survivor of a shipwreck, possibly from the Britannia or the Britomart, both lost in the Bass Strait that year.

The Conversation

A new play about Julian Assange, Truth is an intelligent, thoughtful and unsettling work

Truth, the new play from writer-director pair Patricia Cornelius and Susie Dee, dives headfirst into the contentious world of Julian Assange. It offers us a nuanced portrait of the WikiLeaks founder who transformed from hacker wunderkind to global lightning rod.

The Conversation

My Brilliant Career: musical based on Miles Franklin’s novel takes us on a sassy, spirited journey of self-discovery

Melbourne Theatre Company’s My Brilliant Career is a musical re-imagining of Miles Franklin’s classic 1901 novel of the same name. It follows a young woman, Sybylla Melvyn, as she chafes against her rural constraints to seek creative freedom.

The Conversation

Rent review – earnest Australian production doesn’t save the musical from feeling like parody

Musical theatre can get away with being daggy and manipulative but this show pushes it too far – and this remount doesn’t overcome its faults

The Guardian - AU

Meet Me at Dawn review – a deeply moving meditation on grief

Fairfax Studio, Melbourne Theatre CompanyJing-Xuan Chan and Sheridan Harbridge are excellent as a couple mysteriously marooned on a beach – but the pace of this story is jarring

The Guardian - AU

Seventeen review – seniors play teenagers in a spirited, elegiac meditation on youth

Melbourne Theatre Company, Sumner theatreThe cast are uniformly excellent as raucous, vulnerable teens in Matthew Whittet’s play, which grapples with the mystifying allure and trap of memory

The Guardian - AU

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The Guardian - AU

Australia on stage: the best theatre, musicals, dance and opera of 2023

From ballet to Afrofuturism to a world-class immersive spectacle, Guardian Australia critics pick out the best live stage experiences of the year

The Guardian - AU

Hour of the Wolf review – is this the end of immersive theatre?

This choose-your-own-adventure set in a spooky town haunted by a monster reaches for the baroque – but feels like a hollow cash-grab instead

The Guardian - AU

Escaped Alone and What If If Only review – this Caryl Churchill double bill opens with a masterpiece

These two short plays by the legendary UK playwright span afternoon tea and the apocalypse, past and future, grief and survival

The Conversation

New Aussie musical Bloom misses an opportunity to interrogate the gaps in aged care – and in our social fabric

Bloom, the new Australian musical produced by the Melbourne Theatre Company, is proudly billed by the company as born and bred right here in Melbourne/Naarm.

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The Guardian - AU

Bloom review – Tom Gleisner’s aged care musical is cheerily good-hearted

Katie Weston’s songs are effective enough and Gleisner’s lyrics are serviceable, but Bloom comes to life when the excellent cast get to perform all together

The Guardian - AU

This Is Living review – a group holiday turns sour in autobiographical play that fails to ring true

Dealing poorly with a cancer diagnosis, the central couple seem oddly underwritten – but the piece is saved by the three women who play their friends

The Guardian - AU

Midnight review – feminist Cinderella musical is derivative and Disneyfied

This ambitious production has a talented cast, but it is often so imitative of other shows, it ends up feeling shallow and conservative

The Guardian - AU

Is God Is, the explosive play shaking up theatre: ‘I’ve always been the only Black actor in the room’

The hit play, which is MTC’s first all Black production, blends Spaghetti westerns and Greek tragedies to produce a story that is by, for and about Black women

The Guardian - AU

Jacky review – incredibly uncomfortable, thoughtful theatre

Fairfax Studio, Melbourne Theatre CompanyBy Arrernte playwright Declan Furber Gillick, Jacky follows two Indigenous brothers who clash over the expectations of white people around them

The Guardian - AU

Happy Days review – Judith Lucy is wonderfully disturbing in Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece

Sumner Theatre, Melbourne Theatre CompanyThe former stand-up is a natural fit for the role of Winnie, a tragic woman attempting to stave off hopelessness in the face of great horror

The Guardian - AU

Bernhardt/Hamlet review – Kate Mulvany is astonishingly good

Melbourne Theatre Company, Sumner TheatreMulvany juggles comedy and vulnerability in her performance as the grand dame who decides to liven up her career by playing Shakespeare’s Dane

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