Author: James Murphy

★★★★★ Before Logan St begins, its audience is asked to speak. Across a floor-to-ceiling screen, Uncle Lewis O’Brien and Aunty Lynette Crocker welcome us to Kaurna Yarta. Matt Byrne’s camera moves through the landscape, capturing burbling streams and smoke curling through Country. Together, the audience declares that we have not…

★★★★★ “Sit anywhere you like. Just don’t step on the dirt.” It is the first instruction audiences receive on entering the AC Arts Main Theatre. Three islands of red earth spread across the floor before the stage. Two more sit closer to the action. Behind them, trees sway across a…

★★★★½ Peter Goers may be one of the few Adelaide performers who could walk on stage as Sheridan Whiteside and make the audience feel the casting joke before the first barb has fully landed. Following his successful return to the stage last year in Harvey, Goers now plays the acerbic…

★★★★★ In Eels’ Climbing To The Moon, Mark Oliver Everett sings of the self becoming blurred: where one person ends, and what others are making of them begins. It could almost be an unofficial epigraph for The Almighty Sometimes, presented by Independent Theatre. Kendall Feaver’s play lives inside that same…

★★★★½ Friendship can survive distance. It can survive new jobs, new partners, fluctuating bank balances and the slow indignities of middle age. Whether it can survive a white painting is another question. Yasmina Reza’s ART, first staged in Paris in 1994, has now been translated into 30 languages and has…

★★★★★ Oscar Wilde’s final play, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened on 14 February 1895. That same night, the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, attempted to storm the theatre and hurl a bouquet of rotten vegetables at the stage. He was turned away. Within months,…

★★★★★ There’s a white chair. A white telephone. Both sit on a plinth, waiting. So is she. Ruth Bader Ginsburg waits for the call that will change everything. The appointment. The moment history tips. The play begins here, in stillness, before unfolding into something vast: a life, a jurisprudence, a…

★★★★☆ Anyone who has sat on a local board or committee of any hue, be it the Lions, community radio or amateur theatrics will recognise the world of Australia Day. Before a word is spoken, the set does the work. A bland mustard scout hall. Baden-Powell staring down from the…

★★★★★ You may not know who the killer is, but Cluedo knows exactly what it is. And crucially, unlike its colourful cast of villains, it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Based on the cult 1985 film written by Jonathan Lynn, itself inspired by the classic board game, this stage…

★★★★★ There’s a moment, about ten minutes from the end of Trophy Boys, where the laughter stops. Not fades. Stops. The room goes silent. Pin-drop silent. You can feel the audience recalibrating in real time. What began as a sharp, playful satire lands as something far more confronting. That tonal…