theatre - Whats The Show

Breaking the Castle

17 July 2025 Tam Dahmen🆕

Breaking the Castle Rating

★★★★★

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Creating a successful one-man show is a Herculean task. It requires an enduring assurance of self, vigour of spirit and bold leaps of faith. If you have furthermore chosen to stage an autobiographical story, then the courage and confidence that is required of you is tenfold. Writer and performer Peter Cook has achieved great critical acclaim and impressive mileage from his one-man play Breaking the Castle currently showing at Theatre Works until the 19th of July. Since its premier on the Canberra stage in 2020, this show has undergone a few iterations and is promised to continue developing. If you don’t manage to catch it before the weekend, just quickly zip over to the Sydney Opera House where it will be showing from the 23rd to the 26th of July. Or keep an eye out for the film that will be sure to come out soon.

Upon entry the audience is greeted with a thrust stage (pun intended) designed by Raymond Milner. A menagerie of detritus from half-eaten takeaway containers, books by Shakespeare, alcohol bottles and lines of cocaine litter the space. Eminem’s proclamations of strength and grit fill our ears as we find our seats in one of three sides of the audience. It starts and we begin the journey of this man’s struggle with addiction, ambition and self-actualization.

Enter Davey: an aspiring actor who loves Shakespeare, one-night stands, alcohol and drugs. But this love affair comes at much too high a price. The cost of numbing yourself from unprocessed trauma means that you also lose touch with reality and who you want to be. To be or not to be, indeed.

Each emotional beat of this performance can be credited to director Dr Bridget Boyle and her keen eye for blocking and pacing. There is a strong sense of honest collaboration between the director and writer/ performer and this relationship of trust shines through onstage. You can almost see Boyle’s invisible guiding hand as Cook moves through the space, embodying various characters and voices. The use of Kimmo Vennonen’s soundscape and Ben Hughes’ lighting design further accentuated each dramatic moment as they transpire.

Breaking the Castle is earnest, defiant and deeply personal. It is no easy feat to present your life and bear the vulnerability of self reflection. Yet at its core, this show is about knowing the life you want and daring to pursue it. I wish Peter Cook all the best of luck in finding more things that he likes about himself and the beautiful journey that lies ahead.

To book tickets to Breaking the Castle, please visit https://www.theatreworks.org.au/2025/breaking-the-castle.

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Terracotta Warriors: Legacy of the First Emperor

16 July 202515 July 2025 Carmen Jenner🥉

Terracotta Warriors: Legacy of the First Emperor Rating

★★★★★

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Nothing can really prepare you for coming face to face with one of the most iconic collections in the world. You might already be familiar with the history of the Terracotta Warriors, but until you’re standing in front of them, do you realise that it’s their unique expressions, powerful poses, hairstyles, weapons and uniforms that begin to tell their extraordinary story.

The Terracotta Warriors, currently on display at the WA Museum Boola Bardip, are being exhibited together globally for the first time, including some recently excavated pieces.

In one of the boldest exhibitions to ever come to Perth, over 225 Chinese artefacts include musical instruments, vessels, jade objects and animal figures, including a bronze swan. The exhibition sheds light on China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuang, exploring his life, legacy and afterlife over seven distinct areas, as well as China’s military, societal hierarchy and daily life.

In one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century, the Terracotta Warriors depict Qin Shihuang’s army of around 8,000, created to protect him in the afterlife for all eternity. How so many warriors remained a mystery until their discovery in 1974 is a miracle. Qin Shihuang’s monumental burial chamber remains sealed and preserved in a secret underworld. The tomb took over four decades and more than 700,000 workers to build one of the largest archaeological reserves, and records depict opulent palaces and flowing rivers.

The life-size figures vary in height according to their rank, alongside chariots and horses, and are often referred to as the Eighth Wonder of the World. It’s easy to lose hours delving deeper and examining the artefacts before viewing the main event of eight life-size terracotta warriors and a horse. Although eight might seem like a modest number out of 8,000 warriors, considering they are over 2,000 years old, imagine the undertaking involved to transport the priceless exhibition, including a kneeling archer and a statuesque armoured infantryman.

One thing that really struck me was the way the terracotta warriors were exhibited behind reflective glass, and depending on where you stood in the gallery, their eerie reflections seemed to multiply to the point that you felt as though you were being observed, not the other way around.

Complimented by an immersive multimedia experience, images of the warriors are depicted in coloured uniforms, as they were once painted in a multi-coloured spectacle.

Historians and history-lovers will no doubt take full advantage of the season passes, allowing for unlimited visits throughout the exhibition for $90. General admission is $30 for adults and $15 for kids. Special events include illuminated warriors at night, talks, performances, school holiday programs and cultural events, including the Guzheng Grand Ensemble on Sunday 19th October.

Even if you’re not into history, there’s no denying it’s marvellous that archaeologists are still making such significant discoveries.

The Terracotta Warriors: Legacy of the First Emperor exhibition is held at WA Museum Boola Bardip at the Perth Cultural Centre until Sunday, 22nd February 2026. Located in Northbridge, it seems only fitting to time your visit with dim sum in Chinatown.

To book tickets to Terracotta Warriors: Legacy of the First Emperor , please visit https://visit.museum.wa.gov.au/boolabardip/terracotta-warriors-legacy-first-emperor.

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Heart Lines

13 July 202513 July 2025 Manuela Kacomanolis🥉

Heart Lines Rating

★★★★★

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Written and directed by West Australian award-winning playwright, Kerry Bowden, Heart Lines delivers a heartfelt and thought-provoking play between heart donor and heart recipient.

The play directs the audience to view the heart as being more than just a vital organ of the body.

Having never met the family of his heart donor, 23-year-old heart recipient, Noah, played by Nick Stevenson, records several video blogs to the family, expressing his gratitude and how his life has changed for the better since his heart transplant operation. This clever embodiment of these monologues in the form of video blogs in the play allows the character to speak from the heart directly to the audience.

Noah ponders on the type of person his heart recipient was and how he wished he knew more about the recipient.

Through a series flashbacks, the audience are taken back into of the lives of three young housemates living in Fremantle, Western Australia. Like many other young Australians in their early twenties, Anna, James and Tim are juggling university studies with part-time jobs whilst also squeezing a bit of time to socialize. At first, it is unclear as to which one of these housemates becomes the heart donor but as the play progresses, the new traits and hobbies Noah has developed since his operation are so strikingly similar to one of them that there’s a poignancy knowing this character is going to die.

Noah makes a point about the bittersweetness of heart transplants. The obtaining of a healthy heart has meant the death of another person. In this instance, that other person is only twenty years old.

The play is cleverly written as full-circle story. Noah, who is from the Gold Coast, is drawn to the other side of the country Perth, the hometown of his recipient and even more so to Margaret River where his recipient loved to surf. Although unaware, Noah also crosses paths with people who knew the recipient.

To effectively switch between scenes of Noah’s video blogs and the flashbacks, a warm spotlight is used on Noah, bringing an intimate feel to his messages whereas bright fluorescent lighting is used to capture the upbeat and carefree lives of the housemates in the flashbacks.

At only 70 minutes long, Heart Lines is a short and sweet play presented by the Melville Theatre Company who will contribute $1 for every ticket sold to the non-for-profit organization, The West Australian Heart and Lung Transplant Foundation. A worthy play for a worthy cause.

To book tickets to Heart Lines, please visit https://melvilletheatrecompany.au/current-production#cca6dbda-c607-4472-9f7c-054b47d62a0f.

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Sincere Apologies

13 July 2025 Claire Mulcahy🥉

Sincere Apologies Rating

★★★★★

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Sorry, Apologies, My Bad… There are myriad ways to express regret when one has stuffed up. These are some of the expressions I pondered as an audience member of Bondi Festival’s show Sincere Apologies. Billed as an interactive experience, I will admit I felt a small degree of trepidation in attending; however, curiosity got the better of me and I found myself perched on a fold out chair on a very chilly July evening in the Seagull Room at Bondi Pavilion. The circular arrangement of chairs around strategically placed microphones created an Alcoholics Anonymous-esque atmosphere, as if we were all there to lay bare our deepest regrets.

After a delayed start, the essence of the show started to make sense. Like children at a birthday party, a brown envelope was passed around from chair to chair. When the music stopped, an audience member read aloud instructions to everyone present. Fifty envelopes were to be distributed among the audience. Unfortunately on the night I attended, the audience was quite small. This meant we doubled (or tripled) up on envelopes. This is a show that definitely works more effectively with a full audience.

Based on an original concept by Roslyn Oades and David Williams, the show’s writers Dan Koop, Jamie Lewis and David Williams, have created what proves to be an incredibly reflective and enriching experience. Within each envelope was an apology ranging from the very famous (does anyone remember Kanye West’s social media apology to Taylor Swift after his MTV awards rant?) through to the very personal (an excerpt from an email to Dan Koop’s mother apologising for his decision not to have children). Within the three envelopes I was assigned was an official apology from Eddie McGuire to Adam Goodes in 2013 when he compared the AFL player to ‘King Kong’; another featured part of the apology of a Japanese son apologising to Chinese people for his father’s war crimes. There were even stage directions to bow (deeply) after I recited the apology.

Themes of racism, environmental degradation and social justice run strongly throughout the apologies curated by Koop, Lewis and Williams for Sincere Apologies. At a time when deadly flash floods and heat waves seem to be fast becoming the norm, re-hearing apologies such as the one offered by the Exxon Valdez captain after the infamous 1989 oil spill was a reminder of how little we seem to have learnt from the past and perhaps, how little apologies mean when they are not made sincerely.

The culmination of the hour-long show proved to be quite moving; indeed, I would say even, disturbing. We are invited, through imaginary apologies, to speculate on the state of the world in fifty or even one hundred years time; a state that is pretty dystopian if we continue to live as negligently as we do now. I truly felt a sense of regret as I returned into the cold night, walking past the now dark Bondi Beach, that those imagined future scenarios may very well come true.

Sincere Apologies is a timely reminder that apologies matter and we must make them sincerely and genuinely, whether to those we love or to whole generations of people whose lives will never be the same. It is only when we are truly sorry that we can change the future.

To book tickets to Sincere Apologies, please visit https://www.bondifestival.com.au/event/sincere-apologies/.

Photographer: Mark Gambino

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