Nothing says Christmas quite like a panto! For some people, Christmas is about certain smells or images; for me, itâs Pantos. And judging by the English accents in the audience, Iâm not alone. My daughter and I had been practising all weekâby which I mean I would shout âheâs behind you!â or âoh no you didnât!â at random intervals throughout the day. These were mostly met with side-eye, but let it never be said I arrive unprepared.
Jane Sherwood has done a magnificent job directing Yvette Wallâs pantomime. Iâll admit I wasnât sure how Cinderella would fare in 2025. How do you keep the tradition of male performers playing the ugly stepsisters while still supporting the LGBTQIA+ community? Iâm relieved to say they handled it beautifully, and Kevin Winder (Monsterosa) and Clayton van Dijk (Groteska) were fabulous.
The whole cast was outstanding. I have to give a special mention to Siobhan Fowler (Stella Starlet), whose performance as the Russian ballet mistress was perhaps a little too convincingâI had some unexpected ballet-school trauma flashbacks. As I flicked through the program after the show, I kept thinking, âOh, they were great!â âShe was fantastic!â âHe was awesome!â and âHow did I not realise she played the Fairy Godmother and Kimmy K?â The Evil Stepmother (Candice Preston) nailed the role, and Savage the Cat (Sarah Christiner) prompted a running commentary from my daughter: âYeah, thatâs not creepy⊒ ‘Yeah, that’s not creepy at all.â I shouldnât have started listing cast members, because truly, they were all amazingâand Iâm already over my review word count.
This version of the classic story gives Cinderella a playful modern twist. Sheâs still bullied by her stepmother and stepsisters, still hidden away doing choresâbut instead of a ball, the kingdom hosts a talent show riffing off a certain international competition. The laughter was plentiful, and the âtalentâ was⊠well, enthusiastic. What the stepsisters lacked in pitch, they made up for in volume and enthusiasm.
The set design was clever, allowing for quick, effective scene changesâand for anyone still confused, a screen announced exactly where we were, which gave us a giggle.
Iâm both glad and slightly devastated that I didnât receive the program until after the show. The cast look so different out of costume (credit to the costume designer!), and seeing those photos felt like discovering a magicianâs secrets. But I do wish Iâd read the âfeel free to sing alongâ note beforehand. The songs were so catchy, and Iâm sure my daughter and I werenât the only ones sitting politely when we wouldâve happily joined in. So if youâre reading this before seeing the show: you have permission to sing.
If youâve never been to a panto, here are a few essentials. Audience participation is mandatory. Be ready to boo, hiss, meow (ok, that one is specific to this panto), shout âoh no you didnât!â and âheâs behind you!â, and generally let loose. Youâll need to know Three Blind Mice and you will need to get up and do the Twist. When the invitation came, my daughter whispered, âDo we have to get up?â and apparently my âYesâif a child asks you to dance, you dance!â was loud enough that six nearby adults stood up immediately. I stand by it.
Roxy Lane Theatre was filled with wonderful people. From the warm welcome from Chairperson, Kristen, at the door, to the man at the bar hyping everyone up and explaining panto traditions, to the volunteer rushing around stacking extra chairs so kids could see – this was community theatre at its finest. Everyone worked together to make it magical.
Well done to everyone involved. I normally donât start Christmas activities until the 1st of December, but you helped us kick off our advent adventures a little early this year. Thanks for reminding us of the joy.
Thereâs something rather intimate about being invited to a dress rehearsal of a show. The creatives are milling around you buzzing in nervous excitement. The show is still in bits and pieces on the floor, not yet solid. The world theyâve created is in its teenagehood â not infant in its conceptualism, but not yet fully grown. You feel much like a wildlife photographer, sitting, observing, noticing, but still distinctly on the outside; our presence as critics is both cruelly invasive and fundamentally necessary. In The Presence of Light was my first dress rehearsal invitation, and it offered me entirely new parts of the criticâs experience. Principally, I got to feel how the show was actively coming together around me, and I got to ask a little about what I was walking into.
Spark Sanders-Robinson, creative-lead and the only live speaking (and singing) voice says, when I confess to her I have no experience writing for opera, that this experience is âopera for the uninformedâ â that is, it is an operatic experience for those who donât want to be spoken down to, but instead connected with. She tells me the experience is a deliberation of love, an exploration of what it is in its truest form, instead it being trapped within the bonds of the human experience.
âItâs about death,â she says, then, when Mia Rashid, their dancer prompts, âis it about death?â she responds, âno. Itâs about love.â I am, admittedly, prepared for the experience to be completely incomprehensible after this conversation. I have never been so glad to be proven right.
We are tucked into the M2 Gallery in Surry Hills â an itty bitty space, unconventional, echoey, with what almost looks like a frame surrounding the elevated platform this team is using as a stage. The âstageâ is bare, âcept for a white sheet at the back. Robinson wears a flowy, airy, blue wrap dress â which, with Rashidâs simple white tulle, almost shapeless dress, creates an eerie dreamlike atmosphere, allowing them to become one with the space around them. The space itself is generally unsupportive, and I look up to the ceiling to see what they will do with lighting, because thereâs certainly no view-blocking from-home lights milling about. On the floor, there sits a singular projector, surrounded by indistinguishable frames I donât yet understand. Nathaniel Kong joins us in the room, sits behind the piano.
I ask, upon finding out that Robinson and Rashid will be the only two interacting on stage: âis it a two-hander?â Robinson responds, âkinda a two-hander. Unless you count the piano as a third character.â
We begin.
Recorded responses from what must be over ten or fifteen people fill the room with their overlapping responses, talking about what it is that they love. Although each answer is interesting and beautiful, we cannot catch a single one as they become jumbled and chaotic. Robinson takes the stage and the glow of her projector light snaps on as she begins to talk to the audience (me and their photographer, mind you) about what she defines as love. Or rather, how difficult she finds love to define. She leaves us on a rumination about the use of defining it at all, and the lights go out. Rashid replaces her on stage, taking us through the first of many classical pieces of music in the show. Her movements are wide and grounded, translating the impossible hugeness of love, what it is as a force of nature. Then, as she connects to its fragility and its grief, they go miniscule and wineglass-thin in turn.
Robinson is generally well-known for her use and manipulation of light, no different in this production. Indeed, what makes this light work so interesting across Robinsonâs catalogue is the matter in which it interacts with itself, as well as the people on stage. As Rashid becomes something more human, she catches and releases the light in her hand, and love goes from being something that possesses and consumes her, to something akin to hope, a slight glimmer. Different frames of colour over the projector take us from softer yellows, to bright, high-contrast whites that throw sharp, dangerous shadows behind Robinson. Then, as our dancer rejoins us, she is bathed in a pink light that makes her almost inhuman. It is at this moment I understand the deliberation about the piano. Kong and Rashid seem to not just legitimately communicate, but have entire conversations through the call and response of music and dance. Later, when Robinsonâs mezzo-soprano rings out through the almost-empty room, I remember this relationship in its more traditional form as the opera and the orchestra interact, representing entire sections through these two individuals.
As a production, I cannot tell you that there was an overlapping narrative to this piece. Rather, it functioned as a series of images, more performance art or a film sequence than a piece of theatre. In one moment, shadow puppets creep over the projector, two faces in profile, then meet in the middle for a kiss. Rashid collapses in between them, bathed in, yet shadowed by their love. To that point, the piece doesnât attempt to ask or answer something, it invites you to feel the full scope of an emotive experience in all its beauty and wickedness. The performers are all viscerally facing something through their chosen art form, and the size of the space as well as the passion of their performances makes the whole experience incredibly intimate. In Rashidâs rare moments of pause, we can hear the heaving of her breath. In between Robinsonâs clear notes, we can feel the sound still bouncing around the room. The body-ness of it all provides us with the raw erotic lens of their conversation.
In a technique Iâve certainly never seen before, a glass bowl is placed over the projector, and Robinson and Rashid take turns dripping water, oil, and ink into it, throwing curling and whispering colour across the stage, bleeding and changing the light. As both performers are in white or almost-white, these moments of colours stain not just the background, but them as well. In one particularly effective moment, an explosion of purples appear across Robinsonâs body on stage, as ink is dripped into the centre of the bowl.
In many ways, our fourth character is the continued reappearance of the voices. Although jumbled and confusing through the beginning, they spread out and become clearer. We listen to them talk about their lived experience of love, of grief, of heartbreak, of redemption, of life. This tether of realism affirms the path of images we tiptoe through, as well as providing an edge of human vulnerability to the piece that can sometimes escape a performer.
Although I was invited to the dress rehearsal, I must briefly play the part of the wicked critic and remind the world that no art can be perfect. Indeed, the performance as a whole was brilliant, and my only moments of nitpicking are as follows. Robinson, despite being an incredible mezzo-soprano and having strong monologues, has moments of struggling to sit in her body and relaxing. This, when compared with how viscerally one must be in their body as a dancer, is thrown into rather sharp contrast next to Rashid. Further, each of the three performers had moments of sneaking worried glances at one another, which although can be understood as working through the anxieties and uncertainties of dress rehearsal, manifested as drops in concentration through the show. However, other than this, I truly cannot fault anything else. The light work was inspired and beautifully done; Robinsonâs performance both as an actor and a singer was beautiful;, Rashid took my breath away as a dancer; and Kong brought old music to new light through his work on the piano. The last moments of the show, a Joni Mitchell cover, floated through the more conceptual work of the rest of the piece and touched base with the audience, giving us a tether to hold onto even as the stage swan with an iris of pink spinning light.
In a topic so broad and difficult to fathom such as love, sometimes connecting to the conceptual and visual serves the explorative process more than the grounded and naturalistic ever could. In The Presence of Light shows its audience that the emotional experience is not a logical one, but a visual and physical one, and if we can embrace letting go of our need to understand, we, ironically, come much closer to knowing what that emotion truly is. The team, in this tucked away gallery, have in a way presented something that matched my early anxieties of being incomprehensible. But then, canât we say the same thing about love itself?
‘Nihilistic Optimism on Trampolines’ is undoubtedly one of the most unusual plays Iâve seen this year. Whilst heavy on the nihilism (and light on both optimism and trampolines), it was an original and genuinely imaginative reworking of the supposed origins of the classic novel âFrankensteinâ.
The production blended text from Mary Shelleyâs novel with excerpts from her personal journals adding some emotional depth to the relationships depicted. It also set the whole thing, hilariously, in âTrampoline Worldâ a place of suffocating monotony and lacklustre job prospects. The cast threw themselves into the story with enthusiasm and full physical commitment and for the most part the chemistry between them worked well. The performance of Mary (played by Gabrielle Ward) was a standout, but honourable mention should go to the comic relief of Byron (Eleanor Golding), who brought some levity to the darker moments. While the production lacked polish, any real production values and occasionally slipped into feeling a little improvised, it also aimed high. Reworking a classic text is extremely difficult to do with originality unless you commit fully and take creative risks. To their credit both the writer and cast were clearly swinging for something clever and nuanced.
Where the show really excelled was in its depiction of the sheer monotony of customer facing work. The endless repetitive conversations. The glazed interactions. The joy of mopping up vomit while being surrounded by screaming children and huffy parents. Much of the audience would have recognised their own flashbacks to those teenage jobs where commitment was low, wages even lower and the tangled crushes and camaraderie among staff were the only things getting you through the shift.
Where the show struggled was in clearly communicating the heart of the story. My theatre partner had not read Frankenstein and most certainly was not aware of Mary Shelleyâs dramatic Geneva holiday with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and Maryâs sister, Claire. Which means he also had no reference for the dark emotional chaos that surrounded Maryâs relationship with Percy at that time, nor that the trip, (and her recurrent horrific nightmares), became the impetus which inspired her story – so those little nods to that experience, though explored in the play, were far too easy to miss.
As someone who has read the novel, seen the films and even watched âRowing with the Windâ a period film which dramatises the strained and sometimes unhinged relationships between the four (suggesting, as it does, that much of it was fuelled by both drugs and rather free sexual relationships between them all), I had a much easier time connecting the dots. For audience members without that context, I imagine the play would feel disjointed and confusing. The plot is fragmented and sometimes hard to track even for those who do know the backstory. The jumps between contemporary speech and period speech and the sudden segues between the tangled lives of the staff of Trampoline World and the feverish imaginings in Maryâs mind were not always smooth. Despite solid acting the heart of the play felt obscured under the sound effects, jarring lighting shifts and literal jumping around. In reference to the trampolining side of things, I would note that there wasnât a whole lot of trampolining in the show and none of it was of a particularly entertaining or acrobatic nature – I was expecting something a little more exciting in that respect.
On a final positive note, the live band deserves acknowledgement. Their music added atmosphere, drive and emotional colour to the play and helped anchor scenes that might otherwise have floated away completely.
Ultimately this one was a swing and a miss for me, but with the recognition that it was highly original, and original thinking should always be applauded.
Andrea Gibbsâ Carol is pitched as following 60-year-old Carol as she fights to keep the Christmas spirit alive. While thatâs certainly part of it, this five-actor show (with oh-so-many characters) delivers a timely and poignant social commentary on the reality faced by so many older women in Australia today. Even as Carolâs world unravels and is turned upside down, she continues to shoulder the mental loadâsomething that resonated with many women in the audience.
The playâs themes of hope, resilience, and a womanâs ability to pivot shine through. Gibbs has been called a visionary playwright, and itâs clear this work was written by a woman. No matter what life throws at Carol, not once does she turn to a man and ask, âWhatâll we do now?â She simply gets on with making the best of a bad lot.
The cast is exceptional. Sally-Anne Upton embodies the title role with heart and honesty, and the remaining ensemble (and backstage crew) switch roles with astonishing ease. At one point, Isaac Diamond morphs from therapist to son right before our eyesâI must have blinked, because the transformation was total but somehow I missed it actually happen.
The show itself is delightfully hard to categorise. Woven through its heart-wrenching, resilience-filled narrative is the most Aussie humour, including the antics of Santaâaka Sack Daddyâwho opens the show with some enthusiastic audience participation (Iâve never been more relieved not to be in the first few rows). Thereâs plenty of laughter, and a healthy serve of colourful Aussie descriptors that rightly earn the production its explicit-language warning. Musical Director and Composer Jackson Harper Griggs sets the tone beautifully with original compositions; the music is a genuine highlight.
I canât go past the set design. Bruce McKinven has outdone himself as set and costume designer, crafting a series of spectacular visuals. Walking into the Heath Ledger Theatre felt like stepping straight into the Australian landscapeâeach painted curtain backdrop richer and more evocative than the last.
Carol sits perfectly in that sweet spot between light and dark, humour and heartbreak. Congratulations to everyone involved.
Shows: For more information, visit the Black Swan website https://blackswantheatre.com.au/season-2025/carol. The season runs until 14 December and includes accessible sessionsâaudio description with tactile tour, Auslan-interpreted performances, and captioned sessions.
