Kirk Dodd
Kirk Dodd is a lecturer and playwright with an interest in Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Creative Process(es). He teaches Writing and Rhetoric and Creative Writing at the University of Sydney. He regularly publishes scholarship on Shakespeare’s application of rhetorical precepts, and his creative work has been shortlisted for the Griffin Award and published by TEXT and Australian Plays Transform.
Bell Shakespeare’s latest production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (directed by Peter Evans) is punctuated by stand-out performances: Lucy Bell, as the Nurse to Juliet, steals the show early, with her accounts of Juliet’s birth and growing up; she lends warmth and a sense of time and place that allows this loving and loveable character to shine; Rose Riley (Juliet) gives a solid performa ... (read more)
For fans of Tennessee Williams and this most famous of his plays, this production (directed by Alexander Berlage and produced by Redline Productions) is superb! Buy a ticket now, for the shoebox theatre of the ‘Old Fitz’ can seat only fifty-five people and, like the candles of a Tennessee Williams imaginary, this show will burn brightly, but only for a short time.
Williams’s tragic ... (read more)
There is a moment often conveyed in romantic films (and it was certainly the case with Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet) when fresh eyes meet across a crowded room and become fixated, unable to stop ‘looking’, searching for more and more of the alchemical fire that triggered an intense magnetism.
Ten minutes into Bell Shakespeare’s new production of Macbeth (directed by Peter Evans), I sat ... (read more)
The Sydney Theatre Company’s staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, directed by Kip Williams, is centred around a large rock set on a revolving mechanism that assists with scene changes and helps to animate this rather static play about characters shipwrecked on a tropical island. The rock is reminiscent of the story of Prometheus, chained forever to a large rock by Zeus, but this is the ‘har ... (read more)