Melbourne theatre, musical and dance reviews

Memory is a tricksy companion at the best of times. Even more so when tragedy strikes and lives are shattered or erased.  Grief swirls in unexpected directions, consuming us all of a sudden. In pushing us further forward or pulling us back to where we started, the details get lost, washed away like sand on a beach, then reformed all too painfully clear. So it is with Australian playwright Tom Holloway’s confronting puzzle of a memory play, Beyond the Neck. Subtitled ‘A Quartet on Loss and Violence,’ it was written as a collective trauma response to the Port Arthur massacre and the indiscriminate slaughter of 35 lives, horrendously injuring 23 more.  Drawing on survivor stories using some of the techniques of verbatim-style, the work is a reckoning with how well-meaning media gags on reporting the aftermath and the court case stunted the recovery process for many survivors and opened the door for rampant conspiracy theories. Ooft, this sounds heavy. Should I brace myself?  Look, there’s heavy stuff in here, undoubtedly. But Beyond the Neck is also a hopeful and occasionally hilarious play that reminds us that, even when we are lost in the labyrinth, we can find our way back by following those memory threads. Who's involved? First performed at Hobart’s Peacock Theatre in 2007, nearly a decade after the disaster that reshaped Australia’s gun laws, Holloway’s bracing work still holds sway. This Theatre Works restaging, coming so soon after the atrocity at Bondi Beach, is...