Kate Prendergast

There's always a lot happening on Sydney's stages – but how do you even know where to start? Thankfully, our critics are out road-testing musicals, plays, operas, dance, cabaret and more all year round. Here are their recommendations. Want more culture? Check out the best art exhibitions in Sydney.

In Matthew Whittet’s Seventeen, five teens spend the night in a park after their last day of high school, celebrating the end of adolescence. Among the wooden playground equipment (monuments to that unreclaimable era) they drink from a communal bench, keep an eye out for the ranger, and flicker in that twilight limbo between what they’ve lived, and what’s to come – who they were, and who they hope to be. Perhaps for the last time together, they stand on the sheer cliff of a vast unknown. Their whole lives are ahead of them – only their secrets hold them back. The 17-year-olds (and one kid sister) are played by Di Smith, Katrina Foster, Di Adams, Noel Hodda, Peter Kowitz and Colin Moody. These veterans of the stage are definitely not 17 though, not even close. Assuming AI doesn’t crack the mortality problem any time soon, most of their lives are behind them. Faces seamed and voices hoary, they perform the gaucheness of youth. First staged almost ten years ago by Belvoir St Theatre before it went on to garner critical acclaim in the UK, this is Seventeen’s first major Sydney revival. Who were you when you were seventeen? Do you recognise that person? Would they recognise you?  I confess that, before even seeing this play, I had felt a great, anticipatory, existential sob bubbling up in me. I break down at the chorus of London Grammar’s ‘Wasting My Young Years’. Every morning, I smear a home-made mask of flaxseed, honey and turmeric on my face because a TikTok charlatan told me

When you walk into a show with as many content warnings as this one, you’re bracingyourself for something harrowing. Penned by playwright Shayne (just Shayne) andpremiering at KXT on Broadway, dog was developed with the aim of bringing visibility toaddiction and mental illness – psychological prisons which the playwright knows well. Thewriting clearly comes from a welter of lived experience, and the scenes that play out areraw. Sensitive viewers be warned: while a mental health coordinator was involved inbringing this story to the stage, there is a lot to be triggered by. There’s also a lot to leaveone troubled. Our two struggling characters are ‘Brother’ (he/him) played by Jack Patten, and ‘Sister’(they/them) played by Laneikka Denne. The siblings have exiled themselves to some remote outback shack, the sound of crickets transmitting slow, rolling waves through the hot air. Brother, an emotionally lost spare part in the wake of a break-up, scoops bottle after bottle from an esky as he works on a beaten-up motorbike. He holds the liquor well, until he doesn’t. Meanwhile, Sister’s Contamination Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is in a very bad way. In extended and repeated sequences, we see Denne peel off all their clothes (emphasis on all) and spray their naked body with Dettol. Under a dimmed stage light, we see them quivering with the insuperable necessity and overwhelming shame of the ritual. As both characters played out their unhealthy coping mechanisms, this critic w

A comedy line-up with no white men? Can it be true?! Free from the swinging of colonial dicks, Brown Women Comedy is a space where bad-ass brown women tell the kind of jokes that Australians rarely get to hear – and they totally kill it.     In fact, during their first visit to Sydney, Brown Women Comedy was obliged to add an extra matinee to their five-day run, with every other show sold out. On opening night, producer Daizy Maan, who is also our effortlessly hilarious host, quipped that ‘racial profiling’ (read: handing out flyers to people who looked like her) had proven a very effective marketing strategy. Still, while the show deliberately and joyfully serves a South Asian audience, these women are also simply just funny, no matter what kind of lunch your mum packed you for school – making for a fun, status-quo-kicking night out for anyone.   Along with Maan, the Sydney line-up featured Kripa Krithivasan (podcast host of Uncultured), Guneet Kaur (a RAW Comedy National Finalist), Chanika Desilva, Kru Harale, and Monica Kumar. Each brings their own unique brand of comedy – for instance, Kaur is dry and self-effacing, with lines like the one about how she’s only interested in a threesome as “a means of getting a second opinion”; and Krithivasan is wickedly funny, accusing white culture of “colonising therapy”. There’s a lot of great material about topics like growing up with South Asian parents, interracial relationships, and how ‘CALD’ is a term used only by “Susans from H

Do you enjoy being talked at for 90 minutes? Because that’s what Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World does. Part experimental performance, part anti-murder mystery, part hyperspeed TED Talk on the nature of truth and knowledge in our globalised post-colonial times, Things Hidden boasts many hallmarks of contemporary theatre. For instance: big projections on multiple screens (which ‘authenticate’ and enhance what’s told, while also showing the devious nature of the image) and the energetic dismantling of storytelling’s normative conventions.  A brain-crushing hydra, it’s a little hard to summarise, but I’ll try.  Fereydoun Farrokhzad was an Iranian entertainer and political activist, famous in the ‘70s. Imagine an Iranian Tom Jones. In the ‘90s, as a political refugee in Germany, he was murdered, and the case remains unsolved. Many suspect the Islamic Republic had a hand in it.   Farrokhzad isn’t a fictional character – look him up. Indeed, Javaad Alipoor, the creator, director and main spieler in Things Hidden, asks us to get out our phones and go to Wikipedia. He also invites us to Google ‘subalternity’. Are we really confident we can solve this mystery, like the annoying podcast host character (Asha Reid)? How meaningful are the connections and comparisons we’re making? How reliable are our tools? And what do our western-centric processes reveal about ourselves? Farrokhzad, Alipoor pedagogically corrects us, is not like Tom Jones. He is also not like Raam Emami,

Ode to Joy (How Gordon Got to Go to the Nasty Pig Party) is as ecstatically debauched as it sounds. A bass-hole throbbing master stroke of R-rated comedy, a penis de resistance paying tribute to Berlin’s revolutionary hearth of techno – a refuge for the global kink and queer communities – it is laugh-out-loud hilarious for all its frenetically paced sixty minutes. It just might be the fluid-splattered climax of this year’s entire Sydney Festival. Written and directed by James Ley (already confirmed as one of Scotland’s most thrillingly wit-laced commentators), this filthy fairy tale centres gay Scottish public servant Gordon (Lawrence Boothman). Sexually frustrated and spiritually unfulfilled, unwilling to be spooned anymore by ‘Prince Charmings’ in pubs, Gordon’s homonormative life changes forever when he encounters Manpussy (a magnificent kilt-wearing Marc Mackinnon, doubling as our diva narrator) and his partner Cumpig (a jacked Lithium bunny-man in shorts, Sean Connor).  With DJ Simonotron pumping beats from stage left throughout, our fabulous fellowship travels all the way to Berghain’s gay open sex club, SNAX (tagline: ‘Man Meat in Action’) – a vortex to excess, danger, drugs, freedom, and self-discovery. Manpussy will turn into a glorious en-goggled mermaid queen, Cumpig will turn into a pumpkin, and Gordon will turn into the new European Union.  Ley’s writing and all three actors’ performances produce the most wonderful sustained high. Creativity – in costumes, narrat

To paraphrase a line in Oil: “as soon as mankind had the audacity to dream it could keep itself warm when the sun went down, we were at war”. The Earth became an extractive commodity to be fought over; abstract lines sprung up into nation-states; division, jealousy and greed became society’s ever-burning fuel. Colonialism, empire, capitalism, modernity: the same basic impulse to escape cold and darkness rules them all.  In pioneering British playwright Ella Hickson’s ambitious modern play, it also rules a wilful (and often problematic) mother’s love. A time-bending, continent-hopping, multi-layered sci-fi epic and mother-daughter drama, Oil transports (by magical stretch of the imagination) her two main characters from the Industrial Age in Europe when crude oil was discovered, to the oil-rich Middle East at the turn of the century, to nondescript suburbia, and into the future. In each time period, the scene is some manner of dining room, which rests upon a vast mound of blackened soot (Emma White does a brilliant set). Paul Jackson’s lighting is crucial to our perception of what’s going on, and it is fantastic – moving us through greasy pools of waxy candlelight, to thrusting candelabras of boastful brightness, to rainbow fanfares, and to bleached and glaring whites.  ...the grim yet always entertaining adage of Oil has left me in a dark pool of reflection. STC has achieved a commendable feat. Directed with maturity and panache by Paige Rattray (The Lifespan of a Fact, Blith

When the Allies dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima at the end of WWII, the heat of the explosion was so great, it was two times the temperature of the sun’s surface. That potent image – of two suns floating just above the doomed city and its oblivious people – is one of many invoked by Hisashi Inoue’s magical, intensely moving and timeless 1994 play, which is beautifully translated by Roger Pulvers, a friend of the late Inoue. At last premiering in Australia with Omusubi Productions and Red Line Productions, The Face of Jizo is about a father and daughter – one living with survivor’s guilt, the other who didn’t survive – three years after the explosion, in the occupied and devastated city.  The Face of Jizo will always have a modern relevance, though, for as long as humans lose their humanity to war... This is a ghost story, but, in a marked contrast to the haunting of  profound trauma that casts a long shadow over this story, Takezo’s haunting (Shingo Usami) of his 23-year-old daughter Mitsue (Mayu Iwasaki) comes from love.  In fact, like one of the old folk tales that Mitsue tells the children at the library where she works, her father’s spirit begins showing up in her home just when her heart begins to beat again. Despite herself, she is falling for the scholar Kinoshita, a collector of objects touched by the bomb – things like warped bottles, glass shards, and spiked roof tiles.  “When he started to approach the checkout desk, a soft little sigh slipped from your lips,

A clown show and a climate parable in one, with polar bear puppets, malfunctioning stairlifts and huge howling storms – Belgian avant-garde physical theatre show Dimanche has crash-landed at the Playhouse for the Sydney Opera House’s 50th anniversary festival. Over 75 spellbinding minutes, it delivers its unforgettable offering. A collaboration between Company Chaliwaté and Focus, Dimanche has toured several cities before this one, and comes to Sydney directly from the Edinburgh Festival. With dark humour, heart-grinding pathos and piquantly sublime cross-artform ingenuity, it presents a dystopic story series in which man and animal struggle to adapt to a fast-changing world. There is the foolish and intrepid camera crew documenting the melting Arctic, even as it growls like an ancient monster and breaks apart at their feet. There is the even more foolish family, which performs a comically absurd acceptance of their new chaotic and sweltering norms. There is the polar bear and the flamingo (lovingly brought to realistic life by several puppeteers) – creatures that are equally stubborn in their will to endure, and yet wholly innocent.  Real magic happens here. The kind to make you gasp; the kind to make that ‘feeling box’ inside your chest expand outwards with such intensity, it hurts. And, in a subterranean scene that astonishes, there are the tiny fish that nibble at a man asleep at the bottom of the sea. We witness – impossibly – the man’s luminous form floating in the dark

Content warning: This review and this production includes references to family violence and possible sexual abuse.  It’s all fun and games until the perverted child possession starts. Wicked fun and silly games. Then not so silly at all. It behoves me well to mention, though, that this brilliant adaptation of Henry James’ 1898 gothic, dread-ratcheting novella is far more subtle in its suggestion of (coughs lightly) inter-sibling debauchery via depraved ghosts. In fact, the whole story hangs in the crucial and unresolved question of what kind of tale it actually is. Is it a ghost story, where two innocent and impressionable orphans – exposed to a lechery so vile, so diabolical, i.e. hearing a stud valet and bored governess pumping it in the next room – are not just guilelessly modelling this behaviour during playtime, but are actually having their souls invaded by a carnal evil so potent it has risen from the grave?  Or! – and just hear me out on this one – maybe the prudish and pearl-clutching adults in the room are projecting their own paranoias and lived traumas onto two misbehaving little shits? Is this actually a tale of extreme delusion, reality slippage and terrible consequence?  [Hilliar] knows just how and when to turn the screw, tilt the tension, shift the mood, and lay little insinuations throughout. People of the Victorian era (renowned novelist Henry James being one) were obsessed with the idea of innocence and purity, and were very neurotic about preserving it, e

When you walk into Griffin Theatre Company’s tiny wedge of a theatre and lock eyes with the googly eyes of a gigantic pink rocking horse (with what turns out to be a stripper pole/birthing grip impaling its hindquarters), you suspect you’re in for a helluva ride.  Our journey, directed by Anthea Wiliams, indeed leads us through some eye-popping twists and turns until something (an imaginary bub) finally pops out of heroine Hazel’s birth canal. Our first stop: Glebe Library Rhyme Time, when (the very much not-showing) Hazel gatecrashes a new parents’ group run by the improbably named Mrs Twinkle. (Side note: there are more than a few ‘improbables’ in this play, which extend to Nutella-smeared male stripper bums, a midwife with a whistle, and the breaking of not one but two penises during intercourse, on two separate occasions.)  As we travel along, we get to know 37-year-old Hazel as a woman who is self-centred, crass, fun-loving and Below Deck obsessed – and alternately in oblivious denial and high anxiety about what is happening to her, and what the future holds. Perspectives shift and relationships reconfigure – with friends, loved ones, and old selves. Rather than think about ‘what to expect when you’re expecting’ she fixates on things like the name of her friend’s child – FYI, it’s “Reon”. Her mindset seems trapped inside a snippet of one of Mrs Twinkle’s rhymes: “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round...” “Round and round,” Hazel repeats in low and ominous tones throug

“You book a show with the word climate in the title, you are not messing around.” With this wink of a line, delivered early by one of the five actors on stage, the audience chuckles. We’ve begun playfully, relatively placidly. And, in the first of the fifty speculative vignettes that comprise David Finnigan’s intelligent, affecting and deeply human play on the most urgently all-impacting issue of our time, we continue in this mode.  There’s guerilla activism involving SUVs and lentils. An illegal invisible cat. An affable rural grandfather who calls wind turbines “bird slicers”. But Finnigan isn’t messing around either. The son of a climate researcher, a twenty-year ally of experts, even a consultant for the World Bank on disaster risk himself, Finnigan has earned repute as a theatre-maker who puts the Anthropocene on trial. You may remember him for his 2017 play, Kill All Climate Deniers – or for Andrew Bolt turning purple when he learned about its government funding – or the apocalyptic rom-com 44 Sex Acts in One Week.  Finnigan's play...manages to reach into the minds of its audience and create an emotional, practical and shudderingly wide-ranging awareness With Scenes From the Climate Era, debuting in Belvoir’s mainstage season, it’s like Finnigan has taken a dragnet into the imaginations of our world’s scientists and citizens, increasingly saturated with the discourse and chatter of climate change, and cast up an array that – in its entirety – presents a dizzying mosaic

Tooth and Sinew are the local theatre world’s trailblazers of explosively creative derangement. Doomsday clown prophets with a gift for the cleverly profane, their sick genius perverts the tropes of children’s entertainment to tell end-of-world stories about chaos, madness, stupidity and – as in Apocka-wocka-lockalypse – puppets getting tube-fed a full bottle of urine.  Presented like Play School in psychopath mode, and running in the tiny hothouse of Meraki Arts Bar’s third floor theatre, Richard Hilliar’s play is pegged as the “spiritual sequel” to the lurid and majestic grotesquerie that was Ubu – a clownish tale of idiotic power-squabblers in a society on the brink of total collapse. In Apocka, we’re well past the brink: beyond the heavy locked door of a bunker called ‘Haven’, located somewhere in the deadlands of Parramatta, there are only dust storms, marauding tribes and death.  Hilliar’s plays really lean into nightmarish excess and puerility – simultaneously speaking to our little kiddy brains and our primitive, lecherous id Miss Melissa (a wonderfully unhinged Nicole Wineberg) is our surviving human: an overalls-wearing woman of bright smiles and the honey-toned coo of a preschool teacher. Founder of Haven, she awaits the return of the ‘Last Chance Plane’ – a mythical aircraft which will find them and take them away to wherever the rich people went when the world began to burn. Schnerk, Titzi, Blerkina and Gorbo are our surviving monsters (puppets made by Ash Bell,