Baby Jane, Canberra Rep, Canberra Rep Theatre, 20 Feb-8 Mar

Photographer: Antonia Kitzel.

Henry Farrel's 1960 novel "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" became a sensation when filmed in 1962 - the combination of aging divas Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in a story about two mutually dependent sisters, aging and squabbling while one slips into dementia caused a box office smash and defined the rest of their careers in a series of somewhat lurid shockers. But Ed Wightman's adaptation of the novel takes it back to the original - much of the high-camp is removed and we're returned to a brutal drama about frustrated dreams, childhood exploitation and desperation. This isn't just a tour of memorable moments of the movie - there's no rat and there's no "but you are in that chair, Blanche" - instead we get a stronger look at what made Jane the cracked person we see and the consequences of decades of neglect.

Locking down this more realistic tone is Louise Bennett in the title role - the child within Jane is never far from the surface, including the immaturity and capriciousness of a child, as well as the strong sense of carrying around foundational pain. The role gives her plenty of room to move - there's a moment when she sings when it becomes apparent that if Jane could only learn how to function as an adult she could have a rich and powerful career as a singer, but her stunted expectations of herself as a child performer keep her a disturbing freak - and she seizes every opportunity to explore the range from broken child to bitter monster. Matching her is Victoria Tyrell Dixon as wheelchair-bound sister Blanche - you get the sense of the vain and pampered actress and she's not just a simpering victim to Jane's rages-  she rages back with equal strength. Elsewhere, Andrea Garcia makes her moral, certain maid into something compelling - we empathise with her efforts to help Blanche. Tom Cullen as Edwin Flegg is a character with his own complications-  his attempts to play along with Jane's delusions incresasingly strained as she she presents more and more bizzarely. Michael Sparks as The Man has a role where the pencil-thin-moustache and brylcreamed hair sell 90% of the role - his sleazy approach of providing then ripping away support to Jane's delusions shows how far she's damaged by her past.

Andrew Kay's set is a grand Hollywood mansion with rising mould on the wall - it looks truly lived in and sells the dilapidated grandeur of the characters well. Anna Senior's costume designs match a 60s modernism with the slightly more grotesque look of Jane's throwback performing outfit, without having the throwback outfit look too over the top. Nathan Sciberras' lighting manages the shift from strict reality to the more abstract fantasy situations, and Neville Pye's sound design uses disconcerting echoes and rumbles to heighten the tension.

This is a tense drama of bitterness and rising tension, until the brutal resolution, and is absolutely worth catching. 

Hub Fest 2025, ACT Hub, 16-22 February

 ACT Hub's latest exercise is a new writing presentation doing short plays in repertoire (though in the event one play is genuinely short at 25 minutes and one at 70 minutes is pretty much a full length festival work) - it's as much an exercise for the writers to get their work performed in front of an audience to see what works and what doesn't as it is something for audiences. Both works picked are very much raw material rather than something that feels fully finalised, both are directed by their authors and both feature a mostly young cast with one older performer in a key role for them to play against. 

In the case of "The Beastiary", we get the story of a group of artists in a not-too-distant future fighting back against a government that has blanded out and persecuted political artists (something that feels a little ripped from recent headlines with the Venice Biannale and National Gallery incidents in the news this week). They've managed to kidnap the responsible minister, who's defiant against them, and they confront her using the terms, approaches and language of their given artform. It's an angry young work by Hannah Tonks, and while it moves briskly in her production, and the cast of performers give it a strong and clear production (Kat Dunkerley with the larger load of exposition as Fox, Ariana Barzinpour as Badger, Quinn Goodwin as Donkey and Jennifer Noveski providing nervous, urgent backup as the other artists and Carole Wallace selling both arrogance and fear as the minister), there is some sense of special pleading here - this is artists complaining about being artists in a way that doesn't always find a good way of bringing in the rest of the outside world. The animal masks are well executed and it definitely knows how do to a beginning, middle and end but I would have liked to see a sense that a wider world existed outside the four walls of the bunker the characters exist in. 

For "The Forsaken", we centre on an isolated retiree, Leonard, lost in regret and frustration, who's acquired some sophisticated spyware to listen to the activities of his neighbors - two young parents in one flat and two young male friends in the other and using those to channel his reckoning with his own past. Pat J Gallagher is strong in the role of Leonard, handling some fairly long monologues with clarity and directness, and in support there's good skills shown by Callum Doherty in a dual role as the more easygoing of the two friends and as Leonard's high-energy visitor who brings him various things to interract with, from a parrot to a truly alarming amount of psychedelics, Kara Taylor as the easygoing friend's girlfriend who gets concerned by what's going on with her boyfriend's flatmate, Ryan Hedges as the nervy flatmate working on desperate schemes, Marco Simunec as the young husband resenting his responsibilities and Ashleigh Butler as the wife who feels forever placating him. But Oliver Kuskie's script is very much a mood piece and feels underplotted - there's incident, sure, but it never quite pulls together and comes up with a satisfactory ending - although he does direct strongly to keep sightlines clear in the complex three-location set. 

In short, this is an interesting experiment, though in some ways I would have liked both writers to swap directing duties - I suspect there would have been benefit to both from having an outside eye explore the work and for both to apply their directing strengths to another person's play - and both feel a little under-workshopped. I hope next time ACT Hub tries something like this they either find a structure that allows for more development time or a structure that allows for more outside eyeballs before it hits a paying audience. 

Bubble Boy, Queanbeyan Players, Belconnen Community Theatre, 14-23 Feb

(photo of Rylan Howard by Damien Magee)

Cinquo Paul and Ken Daurio's screenplay for the 2001 movie "Bubble Boy" led to a film that didn't exactly set the world alight, but did have an early lead role for Jake Gyllenhaal. It's a simple comedic premise of an isolated innocent forced to travel through the world when the girl-next-door he loves goes to Niagra Falls to marry someone else, and by most standards, it would have died there. Except Paul and Daurio wound up writing the "Despicable Me" franchise of movies, allowing their pet project of a musical with songs by Paul to get recorded and have further professional development opportunities. Along the way Paul also got to run the TV show "Schmigadoon" and write all the songs for that spoof of popular musicals - alas the "Bubble Boy" score isn't quite as strong - while those spoofs are specific and delightful, these are more generic and time-serving.

And they have produced a bright bubbly musical, albeit one with two issues - one structural, one character-based. For a story that is really a road story with the titular bubble boy meeting all kinds of eccentric characters on the road, it takes until the end of act one for him to actually get on the road, meaning there's an awful lot of plot squeezed into the second half (on the plus side, it's a show that doesn't suffer from the usual act two problems where there's not enough plot to get to the end). The second is that the female lead really feels very very undefined - she clearly likes our leading man but there's never really a rational explanation for why she agrees to get married to someone else beyond providing motivation for him to finally leave his house and go on the road after her - she is the definition of the "sexy lamp" problem, and while Kay Liddiard is indeed sexy and illuminating in the role, she can't overcome the non-existent motivations in the script. 

Still director Tijana Kovac, musical director Tara Davidson and Choreographer Sally Taylor have produced a bright, fluffy, cartoonish production that skates over most of these issues in the moment with a free-flowing production. Remus Douglas' Costumes, sets and props give a cartoon aesthetic with three periaktoids rotating to give different backgrounds depending on if we're inside, outside or somewhere slightly more specific. And the six-member band plays tightly and skilfully, particularly Lauren Duffy on multiple reeds. 

The cast are a charming lot too - from Rylan Howard's innocent but not entirely naive Jimmy, to Kay Liddiard's tough-on-the-outside-but-tender inside Chloe, Aleisha Croxford's obsessive Mrs Livingston, Andrew Taylor's goofily brutish Mark and Sam Thomson's just-goofy Shawn. The ensemble are a charming bunch of weirdos on the road and sing and perform the choreography with a sense of fun and joy. 

This is a perfectly amiable show - if it doesn't quite live up to the last 3 QP shows which played Belconnen Community Theatre (Keating, Downtown and Next To Normal) it's still a nice night out with a young cast giving joy to the audience 

Macbeth, The Q and Lakespeare, The B (and Aunty Louise Brown Park in better weather), 12-16 Feb (and various other locations til March 2)

 After 4 comedies and one history, Lakespeare takes one of the tragedies outdoors (or, in the case of bad weather, indoors under blanket lighting). It's Shakespeare's shortest tragedy, a fast-moving trip through prophecies, regicide, and revenge,  and director Jordan Best delivers a brisk, immediate production focussed on using the cast as an ensemble (all except Isaac Reilly as the titular Macbeth appears in other roles). It's a different production to her last go at the play 9 years ago, but gains in immediacy and in-your-faceness what it may lose in sharp lighting effects and other subtle niceties There's rich power in the production from the initial entrances of the three witches, all dressed as a cross between Goths and Miss Havisham in veils, moving like the otherworldly monsters they are in Gaia La Penna's costumes,  through the personal and political machinations and brutal ramifications of the lust to gain and keep political power, to the final desperate battles against fate. 

Leading the company is Isaac Reilly in the title role - a fascinating study of a strong man undone by his desires, as he loses first his comfortable marital intimacy then everyone around him, you can see the self-delusion that prophecy will protect him right up until it becomes clear it's been misleading him - his increasing isolation and paranoia creating the fate he's been trying to avoid. Lainie Hart has the pure directness of Lady Macbeth, driving her husband to murder then seeing the wedge it forms between them and the guilt it creates within her - there was a moment when she reached out towards me in the audience saying "Give me your hand" and it was difficult not to snap the fourth wall open. 

Elswhere in the cast, Caitlin Baker is boyish enthusiasm as Malcolm, Lachlan Ruffy gives soulful reflection as Banquo before everything comes undone for him (and is a suitably disturbing ghost), Max Gambale has regal poise as Duncan, Paul Sweeney's Macduff is rage and sorrow and grim determination incarnate, Annabelle Hansen's Lady Macduff is wounded pride not quite believing how quickly fate is going to destroy her, and the ensemble in general speaks clearly and true embodying the various characters in the text. 

I must admit sitting on a thin picnic matt on hardwood floors was probably not the best personal choice for my body, though the team also offers picnic chairs if you don't feel like being that close to the ground, and it's probably the superior choice for those with aging bones. But for anybody looking for up-close, personal, impactful shakespeare, this is absolutely recommended. 

Garry Starr: Classic Penguins, MILKE, The Q, 7 Feb (and touring everywhere from Hobart to Wangaratta over the next few months)

 I reviewed two of Garry's shows in 2023 and they were two of the highlights of that year- Greece Lightning and Performs Everything. Much like those two, this is a fast, funny set of sketches tied together by a literary theme - this time based on the orange-and-white covered books published by Penguin Books, with each sketch punctuated by the titles (sometimes based on the story, sometimes just goofing around on the title). Starr's a committed performer, willing to do anything no matter how silly or physically challenging to get a laugh - and after previous performances in a tight pair of tights or a barely concealing g-string, he performs most of the show in nothing more than a top hat, a jacket, a pair of spats and flippers and a ruff - cock, balls and arse completely on display. It's 18+ for a reason. 

Surprisingly, despite the nudity, it's perhaps a slightly less exposing show than the previous two - the vulnerability and  naivete of the Garry Starr character aren't quite as apparent this time - but the clowning is at its peak - he plays with the audience beautifully in a way that is truly delightful. The punctuation of the sketches as he pushes the books off a table, cat-like, never fails to be funny, and is a nice visual motif to let us know how far the show's progressed. There's some clever use of sound and lighting too - it's a more sophisticated physical production (even as it does employ some of the cheapest knob-and-butt jokes known to man). In his post show speech, after the extremely 18+ antics that have taken place for the finale, he mentiones he also has a kids show in his repertoire, "Monkeys Everywhere" - I have no doubt it'll be just as playful, silly and delightful to those of a suitable age and I look forward to our next encounter.

Mojo, Red Herring Theatre Co and ACT Hub, ACT Hub, 22 Jan-1 Feb

Jez Butterworth's 1995 play "Mojo" premiered in an era full of what was described later as "in-yer-face-theatre" - shocking, provocative and confrontational - with sex, violence and drug use to the fore. Led by writers like Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and the early works of Martin McDonagh - a virtual new Jacobean era where blood and shock flowed freely. Butterworth has since moved on to more mainstream writing - his recent "Jerusalem', "The Ferryman" and "The Hills of California" have all played both the West End and Broadway - but this is an early work, set during the british 1950s clubland where the Kray twins ruled and the music industry was full of standover men like the notorious Don Arden. Six men all powered by amphetamines are working to keep teen idol Silver Johnny on hand to promote and exploit, but outside forces are working against them along with their own internal tensions. 

Lachlan Houen directs a tight production - taking us into the grotty backrooms where the deals get made and the dirtywork takes place. We start with the double-act of Sweets and Potts, two low-on-the-pecking order types listening in to the deals being done in the other room - Jack Ferrier as the slightly more pompous of the pair and Joel Hrbek as the endearingly servile one, desperate to please. Taj De Montis as the enabler Skinny shows an independant, desparate streak as he negotiates his way around this world, while Lachlan Herring as the entitled son of the club owner, Baby, is unpredictable dyanmite, expected to go off in your face any second. Taylor Barret as the senior Mickey has a strong sense of authority that the rest of the cast push back against repeatedly and gives them room to manouvre, and Joshua James as Silver Johnny makes an impact with very few lines - you get by his bearing and the way he talks that this is a man who draws attention when he hits the stage and, even backstage in repose, you can see the charisma that the other characters describe. 

Theatre in January in buildings that are not necessarily blessed with the best air conditioning can be a challenge to take, but this is certainly worth the challenge - rough, tense and compelling.