Theatre

Ensemble Theatre’s The Glass Menagerie offers a faithful but thrilling production of Tennessee Williams’s classic play. This iteration of Williams’s ‘memory play’ retains the historical and geographical settings in which the show was first performed (1944) and it does so with attentive fidelity to its language and cadence. The characters are placed firmly in the 1930s, in St Louis. They live in genteel poverty, trapped in myriad constraints – economic, social, and emotional. While Guernica burns, as the present-day narrator Tom Wingfield (Danny Ball) explains to the audience, he works dull days in a shoe warehouse to support his delusional mother and feeble sister.

Is Henry V Shakespeare’s worst play? No, that unhappy honour goes to The Taming of the Shrew, an anti-comedy that grows more rancid with each passing year.

Let’s be clear about one thing from the outset. Any resemblance between this Melbourne Theatre Company musical adaptation of My Brilliant Career and the Miles Franklin novel of the same name seems, as times, purely coincidental.

Zinnie Harris’s adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, in this Spinning Plates production at fortyfivedownstairs, opens on a sombre wasteland setting, bathed in eerie yellow light. In a sudden blaze of colour, a raucous rabble of ordinary characters, rendered extraordinary by Dann Barber’s bold and anarchic costumes, invades the stage. The energy is starkly at odds with Jacob Battista and Dann Barber’s superbly contained and claustrophobic staging. From this heightened theatrical world – part pantomime, part circus – we brace for a wild ride.