Joyce Morgan has been a theatre reviewer at The Sydney Morning Herald. This page contains a selection of her favourite reviews.
Review: Angels In America
The Sydney Morning Herald
February 22, 2019
How many angels can you fit on the tiny Old Fitz stage? More than you
might think.
With its sweeping vision and seven-hour duration, this two-part epic works surprisingly well in this bare-bones production. It finely balances its intimate scenes without sacrificing the play’s transcendent, hallucinatory grandeur.
Angels in America was hailed as one of the great 20th century American plays when it premiered nearly three decades ago at the height of the AIDS/HIV epidemic.
Review: The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
The Sydney Morning Herald
March 29, 2018
We get the leaders we deserve. So when politicians are bent businessmen venal and low-life criminals murderous. the conditions are ripe for the rise of the lowest life of all.
Exiled German playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote his parable about the rise
of Adolf Hitler when the outcome of World War II was still unclear.
The Sydney Theatre Company has revisited Brecht’s work in a thrilling and
chilling contemporary production that avoids the obvious or specific.
This Arturo Ui is not identified with any current despot including one in a
red baseball cap. That is its strength. for it allows us to examine the petri dish of crime, corruption and self-interest that breeds dictators. near and far.
Review: Every Brilliant Thing
The Sydney Morning Herald
March 18, 2019
Ice cream. Things with stripes. The colour yellow. Staying up late. When a mother attempts suicide, her seven-year-old daughter makes a list of everything wonderful in life. She hopes it will sustain her
troubled mother.
This finely crafted solo show achieves the seemingly impossible, a play about suicide and mental illness that is funny and life-affirming.
The audience is integral to the show, performed in the round with the house lights on. Members read out cards with brilliant things written on them – hairdressers who listen to what you want, bubble wrap, the smell of old books.
Review: The Miser
The Sydney Morning Herald
March 8, 2019
He is a man so mean he’d steal flies from a blind spider. John Bell’s
miser is stingy of spirit, filthy of nose-picking habit and ocker in tone.
This is Bell’s first appearance with the company that carries his name since he stepped aside as founding artistic director in 2015.
He has returned as miser Harpagon, a classic role in which Bell’s formidable comic skills and impeccable timing are centre stage. It is a production in which Moliere has been given an utterly Australian makeover.
Review: Mary Stuart
The Sydney Morning Herald
Feb 10, 2019
Two queens play out a deadly endgame: kill or be killed Each era reinterprets the big-stakes final moves of two of history’s most powerful
women, Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart, to reflect its own concerns.
They are back in the spotlight – including in a current Hollywood
movie – as issues of women and power are under global scrutiny
and as Britain itself seems poised to go over a cliff.
This compelling new adaptation by Kate Mulvany presents the
monarchs not as rulers manipulated by cunning male courtiers, but as
women of flesh and blood- quite a lot of blood- who make their own
choices, for good or ill.
Review: The Catherine McGregor Story
The Sydney Morning Herald
April 20, 2018
You couldn’t make this up: A boy from Toowoomba becomes a military officer, cricketer, commentator, author and political adviser. He is the most macho of men who, after years of struggle, transitions as a woman.
“I did do a plausible bloke for a long time,” Catherine McGregor tells us with dry understatement.
There is nothing understated in the extraordinary life of the country’s most high-profile trans woman. Indeed, one of the challenges of this bio-play is how to condense this to just 90 minutes, when any strand of her tale could
make a play.