Shakespeare performances also tend to have that hit and miss quality. But Shakesprovisation, thankfully, was a hit.

We were promised a “litany of word vomit” from our host and man, did they deliver. A coin flip determined the genre of the performance (heads for tragedy, tails for comedy); audience contribution determined the number of people to die (seven) and also the title: The Most Lamentable Tragedy of The Poor Tree.

Just like a real Shakespeare play, in Shakesprovisation, you’re not always entirely sure of what’s going on plot-wise. You just know that something that may have required a simple yes or no response has gone for five florid stanzas, and there’s a heaping of wordplay. The prose flowed freely from the players, who handled inevitable mistakes and awkwardness with humour and confidence. Their characters were delightful and the players themselves all wonderfully charismatic, engaging and witty; it was truly a pleasure to watch them work together so effortlessly.

With a healthy dose of regicide, incest and witchery, Shakesprovisation gives us a well-crafted and darkly comic performance that, as the host puts it, is “kind of fucked…but he would have wanted it this way”. Too right.

Shakesprovisation is on at The Portland Hotel until the 5th of October. Go see it! Tickets and information here. 

All The Single Lad(ie)s is kind of as inexplicable as that. Touted as “a confronting journey that takes you places you don’t expect”, All The Single Lad(ie)s follows a loose narrative interspersed with “drag-tastic” life advice through the medium of Beyoncé.

In the play, an armed man attempts to rob a clothing store; however, the female shop attendant manages to get a hold of the gun and the upper hand. What happens next is a dramatic recreation/straight up appropriation of the news story from earlier this year, when a Russian male who tried to rob a hair salon was fed Viagra and used as a sex slave for three days straight by the female owner.

For a performance that is meant to challenge perceptions on gender, simply reversing the roles isn’t really enough. In this case, gender role reversal didn’t really achieve anything revolutionary or even thought-provoking.

The “drag-tastic” life advice from our drag-tastic host is almost just as rudimentary, but it’s emphatically well delivered. Our host is engaging and funny, but the message isn’t as bold; All The Single Lad(ie)s didn’t really have much to say about gender beyond that it isn’t black and white.

While the message was obviously positive, when combined with the somewhat unimaginative narrative, it ended up coming across as shallow. While the cast were all obviously accomplished actors who were able to inject some enjoyment and suspense into an otherwise unoriginal play, the best part of All The Single Lad(ie)s ended up being the over-enthusiastic dance routines.

Click here for more information.

You’ll learn all about the dark arts of the fedora, the dangers of the friendzone and the magic of bromance. If you’re not an Alpha King Dog by the end, sorry – no refunds.

The semen-ar follows a series of lessons, encompassing everything from business and networking to style and dating etiquette. Callaghan and Law play your typically charismatic, overly enthusiastic presenters who are actually just failed shysters that share a mutual disdain of women.

They work fantastically with the audience, calling on the guys in the audience throughout for their input and participation; their awkward role-plays very entertaining.

As a character piece that takes the piss out of these kinds of annoyingly enthusiastic and extremely transparent self-improvement gurus, Man Academy is absolutely spot-on. The content, reflective of the kind of guys who might actually pay for such a course – i.e. Men’s Right Activists and Red Pill-ers, is ever hilarious. But it does end up ringing like a big old circlejerk after a while. Nonetheless, Man Academy is a hilarious, light-hearted examination of self-help seminars, and the kind of crowds that might genuinely attend them.

Click here for more information. 

It features a parade of perfectly absurd characters and scenarios, including but not limited to: an alcoholic heart surgeon, a jerky eight year old with ADHD, an imaginary friend named Firenze and a security guard that doesn’t get sarcasm.

A tight script from Sam Floyd (also actor, of drunken surgeon fame) is laced with subtle gags and puns that slot in nicely beside all of the craziness; the wordplay doesn’t reek like an ad-hoc attempt to fit into the strict guidelines of content. The plays themselves explore the things we tell ourselves to feel better; the excuses for our abhorrent behaviours. Albeit, it does feel a bit too explicit at times – but I guess it’s fitting given the overblown nature of the scenes themselves. Some are a bit more abstract in their intentions, however, and The Imaginary Breakup ends up being the standout play.

Remy Coll, Anthea Greco and Sam Floyd are all superb performers, managing to jump through the hoops of a demanding script and keep it engaging despite the structure. My Brain Made Me Do It may be an exercise in insanity, but solid acting and writing keep you from turning as such.

Click here for more information.

Very rarely does one person’s anecdote captivate you for the full duration. In fact, we tend to overestimate our lives as being much more interesting and worthy of telling than any audience. This does not hold true for Escape from L.A.. Bastow paints a hilarious picture of expectations crushed and dreams rearranged. She manages to capture the eccentricity of Los Angeles and the emptiness of Hollywood, perfectly likening it to the pixelated boundary walls of an MMORPG.

Bastow herself is engaging and endearing; self-deprecating without harping on the too-easy “struggling writer” material so available to her. Escape from L.A. is a fantastic comedic analysis of an insane city and the tropes it bestows unto its inhabitants; completely free from self-indulgent, “you had to be there” flops.

Highly recommended.

Click here for more information and to purchase tickets.

The three central characters are quite different: there is Liv, the self-proclaimed sexpert who is taking the recent break-up of her three week relationship particularly badly; Andie, the seemingly aloof, typically studious virgin; and Kate, the trendy girl with the extreme-social-activist boyfriend Jasper and an affinity for gin. The play deals with the three girls navigating three very different relationships scenarios, and examines the varying ways in which men and women behave in their romantic and non-romantic pursuits.

Liv has taken up residence on the couch and amassed herself with an army of cried-into tissues, adopting the typical Hollywood tropes of the Recently Dumped Female. Kate has both the girls telling her how lucky she is to have a guy that is a feminist, but she can’t deal with Jasper’s extremism and copes by drinking lots of gin. Andie falls somewhere in between the continuum, ashamed of being a virgin but proud of what she has achieved without a man in her life. In an attempt to portray the different angles of what we know as gender-typical behaviours (and those in between), the characters unfortunately end up somewhat shallow and one-dimensional – as if we know exactly how they’re going to behave because of the narrow constraints they have been moulded into.

Credit goes to the cast for winning some deserved laughs throughout with strong performances, despite a script that read much too transparent and a plot that felt inorganic and messy. Perhaps this writer had expectations that a self-proclaimed comedy about feminism and relationships would inspire some thought or conversation. Unfortunately, La (The Feminine Definite Article) prompted neither. It builds on a fairly elementary understanding of feminism, reflected in discussions of girls only pretending to like video games for male attention and taking the piss out of self-help books that help Cosmo-reading women to “Get a Life, Get a Man”.

Ultimately, it’s not as if you’re sitting there wishing for La (The Feminine Definite Article) to end, but you’re not particularly impressed by it. You’re neither overwhelmed or underwhelmed watching this, you’re just “whelmed”.

Click here for more information and to purchase tickets to the show. 

Dassalo portrays Cameron Poe, some years after the initial felon-manned flight, trying to adjust to normal life. His wife Tricia (Kate Dehnert) is finding herself less attracted to her former action-hero husband, now made redundant from his job at the dildo making factory. In an attempt to spice things up, the pair take a romantic cruise, which is promptly hijacked by financial bad boy Bernie Madoff (Jamie Robertson) and steered into the Bermuda Triangle. Just like every bad-good action movie, an endearing little orphan meets many a misfortune, and one-liners sprinkle every turn of the script.

Con Air 2: Con Voyage is absolutely ridiculous – haphazardly written and “poorly” acted in meta-tribute to the film that it pays homage to. It’s bad in the good way that makes you cringe gleefully in solidarity—for mutual love of overly dramatic action films from the nineties. The D-grade show merges classic, gaudy dialogue with heavy doses of crass Australian humour to get you buckled over and shouting in laughter. Dassalo, Dehnert and Robertson are all fantastic; their chemistry and sheer enjoyment is evident throughout. At times, Dassalo shifts between Poe and Nic Cage – asking for lines and accidentally introducing himself as Nic. It strikes as a somewhat unnecessary deviation from the ethos of the show. Thankfully, it only happens a few times and the comments from the “director” give a sense of comic redemption.

The idea of a show about Cameron Poe’s life after the events of Con Air seems rife with potential for overreliance on bad Southern accents and conveniently rebirthed John Malkovich characters. Thankfully, Con Air 2: Con Voyage goes beyond being a mere consortium of action film tropes (though there are plenty of those, don’t you worry). It stands as a conceptual tribute – to bad action movies everywhere.

Con Air 2: Con Voyage is on at the Imperial Hotel until the 21st of October, and then again on Saturday the 4th of November. Check it out if you’re a bad action movie lover.

Click here for more information about the show and to purchase tickets.

Web Junkie is shot unobtrusively, granting the audience a probing and ultimately disheartening glimpse into both the centre and the wider issue at hand. The patient pool is made up almost entirely of isolated teenage boys. With some playing World of Warcraft in internet cafes for upwards of ten hours straight and threatening suicide when their computer is at risk of being taken away, they log on to escape the ‘fake’ reality they exist in. The real issue of Web Junkie is not problematic internet use. Instead, it emerges as a symptom of a massive generational gap between isolated children and their frustrated parents, who deem them disrespectful and ungrateful. The young people, lonely in a single-child-policy country and overwhelmed by parental pressures to get good grades, find themselves disengaged from their depressing realities and turning to the internet.

The inherent ridiculousness of the situation is obvious to any outsider looking in. The dogma and junk science being espoused by the clinicians and facility staff (likening the internet to heroin) and the tears and frustration of the boys are sometimes so alien to the audience that it prompts laughter. Indeed, there was definitely a sense of dark comedy to Web Junkie, stemming from both the situation (one boy sobbing while confessing, “I used the internet!”) and the compensatory sarcastic jibes from the boys. Laughter gives way to sadness, however, in the more tender moments of Web Junkie, such as family therapy scenes between the parents and their children that are a hundred times more engrossing than the rest of the footage.

For a documentary that deals with such unique and perplexing subject matter, Web Junkie seems to represent a missed opportunity to comment more firmly on a ridiculous practice that is so obviously a governmental band-aiding of a wider cultural issue. However, it does instil a sense of puzzlement in its audience, so perhaps the goal here is awareness and not condemnation. Even if it does feel as though Web Junkie falls short in being a fully realised and provocative exploration of an extremely interesting topic, it succeeds in painting a surprisingly comic and heartfelt example of a generational gap left to fester.

3/5 stars

Jens Harant’s work behind the lens is fantastic; the camera is almost constantly at Jack’s eye-level, following him with patient supervision and ramping up the tension with hurried overtones when necessary. We see Berlin in a beautiful summer light that runs opposite to the magnitude of Jack’s predicament. Plentiful long shots capture the beautiful urban playground that we are invited to snake through with the brothers.

Ivo Pietzcker delivers a convincing and sympathetic performance as Jack, though he can appear slightly one-dimensional in his stony exterior, which is broken, for a moment, in a painful expression of doubt upon an anticlimactic reunion with his mother. For the most part, Jack is responsible, but little details betray his youth: taking sugar packets for Manuel and himself to eat, or stealing binoculars from an electronics store to replace a friend’s pair that he was responsible for losing. The smaller details of Jack are all-important; through them we see a fully realised family, in all of their quirks and flaws, and a careless mother that somehow defies our condemnation.

Jack doesn’t take the easy route in vying for our sympathies; no dire harm befalls the boys in their tour of Berlin, and though you do eventually let yourself breathe, it just gives way to a heavier sadness. Jack really drives home the reality of the situation, and forces you to accept the motherly unreliability that will only continue to affect the boys. Although Sanna is selfish and flighty, she does redeem herself somewhat by giving herself wholly to her kids when she is around, and it’s very clear that she loves them dearly, even if she doesn’t know how to be a responsible parent.

On a broader scale, Jack forces us to face the actuality that many boys Jack’s age might come to know; too young for independence and almost too old for the system, these boys are caught in limbo between youth and adulthood. Sometimes the neglect or abuse isn’t as visible, but it still has the same effects, and can leave boys like Jack all alone in a city like Berlin.

3/5 stars

Without knowing too much about Locke, the first guess might be that he gets caught amidst some crazy Statham-esque occurrences. By contrast, the content of the film is truly ordinary, and yet you still find yourself swept up in it, agonising over who it might be on the other end of that robotic “call waiting” voice.

The real spectacle of Locke is the titular character; a good (?) man who is fixated on his black-and-white interpretation of good and bad, unapologetically resolute in the atonement that he is journeying towards. Hardy is absolutely enthralling as Ivan Locke; the attention to detail in his reassuring Welsh burr and pained expressions at odds with both the gravity of the situation and his unyielding allegiance to the decision he intends to follow through with. The result is an enigmatic character that we yearn for more of, who we marvel at as the ramifications of his decision continue to unravel. It’s a testament to the actor, who has played such outlandish characters as Charles Bronson, Bane and Handsome Bob, that he can produce the same awe-inducing effects with so little. It truly is a pleasure to watch Hardy revel in the single-subject, single-location method of filming.

Locke is expertly paced, whetting our appetites for knowledge and resolution as the reality of Locke’s present situation unravels precisely and organically. Every step in the chain of events feels real, even the scenes where Locke faces his deeply personal reasons for carrying out this destructive decision. In these moments, Locke breaks his composed telephone persona to confront the demons of his past in the rear-view mirror. Taking a step back, these scenes could appear somewhat ridiculous, but Hardy gives them life, his restrained madness resonating with the powerful diction of Daniel Day-Lewis as oil tycoon Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood.

At times slightly bogged down at times by laborious visual effects, Locke is bolstered by a fascinatingly restrained script (although you would expect no less from Knight, screenwriter of the brilliant Eastern Promises) and a superb supporting cast. The incoming and outgoing callers are emotionally masterful and at times darkly comic, bringing us a familiarity that may have seemed impossible given their faceless roles.

Locke is a character piece of an intriguing and perplexing man, who believes he is good and moral, yet doesn’t utter an apology until he has driven almost a hundred miles away from his family and career. It fleshes out the difference between good and bad, and the importance of doing what’s right no matter the cost. Locke is ultimately blown out of the water by a powerhouse performance from Hardy, who manages to breathe a boggling amount of life into such a sparse setting, and keep us on our toes until that last phone call.

4/5 stars