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fortyfivedownstairs

RUNT 

fortyfivedownstairs
by
26 February 2021

A low circular wooden walkway. A large canvas sack hanging from the ceiling. One sickening second to realise someone may be inside that sack, before it plummets to the ground. This is how Patricia Cornelius’s new play, RUNT, directed by long-term collaborator Susie Dee and starring another long-term associate, Nicci Wilks, opens: a thudding coup de théâtre that immediately establishes the work as incitement, as agitprop, as uncompromising sucker punch.

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Burn This 

fortyfivedownstairs
by
01 February 2021

Actor Mark Diaco spent ten years trying to secure the rights to Lanford Wilson’s 1987 play Burn This. You can see why. This is theatre that feels good to perform: full of drama, wrenched love, long monologues, and floods of tears. The characters are meaty, the dialogue turbulent, dizzying, and technically complex. These are show-piece roles. They exist, though, in a script whose latent gender politics are at risk of overshadowing the story.

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The Curtain 

fortyfivedownstairs
by
02 March 2020

A boarding house, late evening. Two elderly men pace fretfully, unable to settle. They are, we learn, waiting for their landlady to return home. She goes out rarely and tonight is later than usual. Should they play cards? No, says one of the men, I always lose. I’ll let you win, says the other. Then there’d be no point in playing, rejoinders the first.

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In this intelligent and unusual play, director Peta Hanrahan arranges Virginia Woolf’s great essay A Room of One’s Own into an hour-long play for four voices. Curiously, perhaps, it works so well as a play because of how well Hanrahan has read the essay.

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Gay theatre, or at least identifiably queer theatre, has never had much of a presence in Australia; most of what we consider canonical has come from overseas. The Elizabethan stage had Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare had two characters named Antonio, in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, who are ...

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Patricia Cornelius has a passion for putting unlovely characters on stage. It has almost become an end in itself. Here she chooses, as her anti-social subjects, three violent, foul-mouthed women, all from broken families or foster homes, all victims of sexual and physical abuse, all bruised down ...

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ABR'S NEW PARTNERSHIP WITH MONASH UNIVERSITY

Australian Book Review is delighted to announce a major new partnership with Monash University.

This alliance between ABR and the internationally renowned Group of Eight university augurs well for students, scholars, writers, and readers. The magazine ...

Be warned: what follows is in the nature of a rave. It’s not often one is tempted to weep with gratitude for how the theatre has brought a play to such magisterial life that one can’t imagine ever wanting to see it again – let alone supposing it could be done better. If you’re tired of over-smart productions doing vulgar, opportunistic things with great plays, then Ariette Taylor’s recent production of Chekhov’s Ivanov at fortyfivedownstairs (that’s 45 Flinders Lane) was the place to be. It was an occasion of unalloyed joy and celebration.

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