It just stopped

Company B is back at their Belvior St venue, all refurbished and with seats that are actually comfortable! ‘It just stopped’ is the first play we’ve seen back at the original venue, and it made me appreciate the intimacy of the venue.

The play is a black comedy that explores what would really matter if everything just stopped – water, electricity, even (gasp) mobile phones. Americans Franklin (pretentious music critic) and Beth (redneck radio producer) are left with only their feature wall of jelly beans and large ego’s. However, they are soon joined by Aussies Bill (bloke, box-maker, sexist nihilist) and Pearl (strange, passive and very 50’s).  Together they decide if this is the end of the world, and if it is, what to make of it?

The script, acting and production where all excellent – no mean feat given the interuptions of re-building their theatre. There are plenty of boring, navel gazing ways about thinking about the meaning of life – this play manages to avoid them all and make it fun, dark and relevant to today’s culture.

My Rating: 4 Stars

See the Sydney Morning Herald for another review

V for Vendetta (The Movie)

I meant to see ‘V for Vendetta‘ at the movies but never got around to it. So last night my partner and I watched it on DVD. It was fantastic, but the movies would have been better. It’s a movie adaptation of a comic book of the same name, and the larger than life nature of the film suits cinema.

The film is set in the near future of around 2015, where America has fallen to civil war and Britain is ruled with a iron fist of extreme conservative party leader and ‘High Chancellor’ Adam Sutler. During the ‘reformation’ that leads this fascist to power, V winds up in a sinister experiment facility, where gays, blacks and other minorities are sent and experimented on. This brutal treatment fills him with hate, and he sets out to get his revenge and bring the government down. Wikipdeia has the best plot synopsis.