Delivered at the tail end of The 2019 Melbourne Writers Festival, the second Victorian Indigenous Literary Festival Blak & Bright, with many free sessions from over 60 First Nations storytellers covering all genres – from songs to essays, oral stories…
Women’s collective agency is on show in a new, Robert Reid directed The Bacchae performed inside the famous former Carlton Courthouse, remade as the La Mama Courthouse Theatre. A play tradition rooted in deeply patriarchal Athenian society, where women are the…
Andi Snelling has earned her reputation as one of Melbourne’s deeply enticing physical and character performers, and her return to the stage with ‘Happy-Go-Wrong’ is a long awaited devoted performance that addresses ailment and struggle that is both personable and…
Would it be a profound epiphany you’re after; or, are you looking for something a bit more streamlined? We have a 2-for-1 deal for the month of March. Your internet’s different to mine, doctor! In a world of dead, or…
Ophelia isn’t the only one playing centrestage in Three Birds and Essential Theatres’ combined new dramatic exploration, Enter Ophelia. It’s woman as subject, writer, and performance maker that paces centrestage as well. And there’s no better character, or group of…
There are those who like the bleak, philosophical plays of mid-twentieth century Irishman, Samuel Beckett, and those who would rather swallow poison. On offer for us, in the subtle darkness of La Mama’s old theatre, were two short plays brought…
Australia’s most famous contemporary playwright, David Williamson returns to his theatre roots and renders a heroine for the times in Credentials, premiering for La Mama Theatre’s 50th anniversary. Invited by Artistic Director Liz Jones to present a commemorative work, Williamson…
In the dark cold of a Victorian prison, no one hears your cry. That was how it seemed for us, audience ‘inmates’, as we heard his searing lament on incarceration by famous 1895 convict, and literary giant, Oscar Wilde, in…
The smallest theatre in town with the biggest legacy, La Mama hosted The Melbourne Festival Of Puppetry 2017 over the winter school holidays and the delights were manifold. Approaching through a ‘marketplace’ of tiny stalls and puppetry booths, we’d later…
Women in khaki. Long, hot, hours tending to the sick and wounded in a desert hospital, with scant resources. Calls home where you can’t speak to your children. The challenges of enlistment in the early 20th century in a Victorian country…