I went to the theatre just nine times this year, and it wasn’t hard to choose the three I enjoyed most. Leaving aside the splendid Flying Fruit Fly Circus, I pass over in silence what children’s theatre I saw, and I won’t name the play that turned out to have been written by a HSC student who had watched a lot of Derry Girls.
So here they are: Jodie Comer in the National Theatre Live production of a play that had its premiere years ago at Sydney’s minute Stables Theatre; a new production of an epic play about Sri Lanka, just as alive and engrossing in the Carriageworks as it was in the Sydney Town Hall; and a stunning one-woman piece in which Vaishnavi Suryaprakash tells a story in Bharatanatyam dance.
Prima Facie (Suzie Miller 2019, seen in the National Theatre Live production)
Counting and Cracking (S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack 2019, seen in Belvoir’s production at the Carriageworks)
Nayika a Dancing Girl (Nithis Nagarajan and Liv Satchell 2023, at Belvoir Street Theatre)
The Emerging Artist and I watch far too much television. Fortunately, a lot of it is very good. We’ve learned the art of temporarily subscribing to a streaming service to watch a particular show, but we haven’t quite learned not to be seduced into staying subscribed.
We whittled our list down to twenty (20!) shows. Here they are, broken into more or less arbitrary categories:
Me fail? I fly! 