Conclave is, at its heart, a letter of love and hope addressed to the Church. This doesn’t mean that it is uncritical of the Church, or its leadership. The film takes as its subject the Roman Catholic Church – specifically, a meeting of the College of Cardinals to elect a new Pope. The cardinals gather in conclave: a private meeting. They are supposed to be isolated, walled off from the world so that they might prayerfully discern and then cast their ballots. ...
Not A Boring Life (Yvette Wall’s latest play) gets going even before it starts, the set itself offering the audience a laugh and a challenge before the cast have even entered the stage. A rather bold painting, volcanically mammillary, hung at an ostentatiously crooked angle, immediately draws the eye. From between the tracts of land comes running water: you could almost imagine a biblical patriarch hovering nearby in hopes of meeting a wife. What, I found myself wondering, is this all about? Who would hang this painting in their living room? ...
“Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived” So goes the old ditty, gleefully recited by a fellow audience member standing near the bar during intermission. Ladies Who Wait is currently being performed at the Subiaco Arts Centre. On the surface it’s a bawdy, dark comedy: the Tudor Queens brought to life through a series of improbable encounters with two common servants, Alice (Colleen Bradford) and Agnes (Fiona Forster). Yet, there’s far more to this play. Yvette Wall, its playwright, has well and truly subverted that old rhyme. These Tudor Queens are, truly, queens, brought to life, embodied, granted agency, no longer merely the objects of that horrible chain of verbs. ...