What Did She Think?

What: Birdcage Thursdays When: 2 November - 12 November 2017 Where: fortyfivedownstairs Written by: Sandra Fiona Long Directed by: Caitlin Dullard Performed by: Sophia Constantine, Sandra Fiona Long, and Genevieve Picot Set by: Joanne Mott Lighting by: Rebecca Etchell Sound by: Raya Slavin Sophia Constantine and Genevieve Picot Theatre is being kicked and dragged into the 21st century by original thinkers and people (mainly women in my opinion...) who are eschewing the standard tropes of narrative dominated story telling, moving beyond affective performance making devices, and going straight to the heart of experiences with what I like to call post-truth theatre. Sandra Fiona Long is one of these intrepid trail blazers and tales such as Birdcage Thursdays , playing at fortyfivedownstairs this week, which embody script and performance as equal partners is leading the charge. Long's writing is deceptive in that, on the page, they appear finely crafted hyper-realistic

What: The Comic Psychic - Are You There Michael Jackson? Where: The Butterfly Club When: 1-5 November 2017 Performed by: Bernadette Mirabelli Bernadette Mirabelli We often talk about seeing and hearing diverse voices on stage, but after watching The Comic Psychic it occurred to me that there is one voice we see and hear little of - the middle age immigrant woman. Laughing along with Bernadette Mirabelli's puns and pop culture humour I had the best 45 minutes in a long time at The Butterfly Club last night. I have spoken before about how much I enjoy evenings of 'dad humour' comedy - how gentle they are as you cackle benignly with the corny joke heard a million times before. With The Comic Psychic I realised I had missed the wry, dry wit of the mum/grandma keenly observing life in a self-deprecating manner and working her way through a bottle of gin or vodka. For our psychic Madame Elbac, the choice was vodka. Her five vegetables a day are the brands of potat