Melbourne theatre, musical and dance reviews

Somewhere off the coast of Devon is a dreary little island with high cliffs, higher tides and no way to escape. It’s Soldier Island: a lovely place to put your feet up, take a dip, meet nine strangers and watch as you all get slowly picked off one by one. This is the wickedly thrilling premise of Agatha Christie’s 1939 classic And Then There Were None. A favourite among Christie fans (and Christie herself), it arrives at the Comedy Theatre in a production that once again proves that the master of the whodunnit can still thrill us nearly 100 years on. Yet this revival from director Robyn Nevin – her second of Christie’s following 2023’s The Mousetrap – rests on the laurels of its author too often, offering a passable but ultimately thin restaging that I think signals the end of the recent resurgence of British classics in our theatres. It’s 1939. Ten people have been invited to Soldier Island under suspicious pretences. They have little in common apart from the skeletons in their closets. For much of the show’s bloated first act we’re watching this motley crew of potential victims introduce themselves to each other. Christie is famous for her ability to construct a complete impression of a person in one short phrase. But here, these characters have a tendency to over explain themselves, and it can get a bit tedious. You can feel Nevin trying to amplify comedic beats or attempt more creative blocking to avoid this exposition-heavy first half from getting too stale. For this,...

It’s hard to make good political satire on the Left, though it is easy to make fun of us. There’s no lack of good material, or good satirists. But we’re a constantly moving target with an ever-evolving set of terms, concerns and ideas. And we’re also a bit of a sensitive bunch with a tendency toward self-importance. This is the knife Deborah Frances-White gleefully twists in her satirical dramedy Never Have I Ever. In the program notes for this Australian premiere at the Fairfax Studio you’ll read the show described as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf for the modern age”. But it’s more Edward Albee via the Netflix Original: an entertaining mix of bawdy wit and fine-tuned political takes with splashes of soap opera-style melodrama. Elevated by a high-energy cast and an evocative set, it promises plenty of light-hearted laughs in between clear-eyed insights into the paradoxes of being a modern progressive. The Fairfax Studio has been transformed into Masada, a Turkish restaurant somewhere in London run by Jacq (Katie Robertson), a white bisexual woman who grew up poor and might be one-sixteenth Turkish. These facts are important to the play and the world of identity politics it wades so confidently into. It’s a familiar realm for Frances-White, the Brisbane-born expat whose The Guilty Feminist podcast built a huge following with its brand of wry self-awareness and nuanced encounters with Leftist hypocrisy since it started in 2015. That was ten years ago, when the language of...