Tag Archives: send for productions

Review: Goodnight Sweet Prince (Old Fitz Theatre)

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Venue: Old Fitzroy Theatre (Woolloomooloo NSW), Jul 31 – Aug 15, 2026
Playwright: William Shakespeare (an adaption of Hamlet by Liesel Badorrek, Raj Labade, Jack Twelvetree)
Director: Liesel Badorrek
Cast: Raj Labade, Jack Twelvetree
Images by Campbell Parsons

Theatre review
Goodnight Sweet Prince offers a seventy-minute distillation of Hamlet, gathering the play’s most searing moments of introspection into a concentrated portrait of psychological unravelling. Yet in privileging the prince’s interiority, the adaptation strips away Shakespeare’s chiaroscuro—the interplay of levity and darkness, of courtly intrigue and metaphysical dread—leaving behind something closer to a single-note meditation on grief.

Liesel Badorrek’s direction sustains a formidable emotional pitch, executed with considerable polish. The result, however, is a production that feels curiously remote: relentlessly intense yet strangely unaffecting, as though the audience were observing anguish through reinforced glass.

Keerthi Subramanyam’s set design finds poetry in ruin. Drawing on the internal dilapidation of Shakespeare’s characters, the staging evokes decay with arresting beauty—flickers of faded grandeur and decadent ornamentation lending the production a visual richness that partially compensates for its emotional austerity.

Verity Hampson’s lighting is exuberantly theatrical, responding to the text’s most dramatic registers with bold, heightened imagery. Ross Johnston’s sound design is similarly ambitious, tracking every cadence of the abridged script with almost forensic attention. The score works so diligently to underscore each emotional beat that it threatens to become a co-narrator, at times articulating as much of the story as the words themselves.

Raj Labade brings formidable concentration and raw feeling to the title role; his Hamlet is never less than utterly committed. Yet the compression of the text ultimately estranges us from the very suffering it seeks to dramatise. We recognise the authenticity of the anguish without being invited to share it. Jack Twelvetree moves with remarkable ease between Horatio and an array of supporting characters, his versatility shining through in sharply differentiated performances that lend the production welcome breadth and texture.

There is, finally, the question of relevance. It grows increasingly difficult to locate our sympathies within the precincts of royalty; the historical convention of identifying with kings and queens now feels almost exotic. Suffering may be universal, but our compassion need not be indiscriminate. Perhaps there is a quiet liberation in withholding our empathy from those whose privilege has been maintained, across generations, at the cost of so many others’ disadvantage.

www.oldfitztheatre.com.au | www.instagram.com/goodnightsweetprinceplay

Review: Send For Nellie (Wharf 1 Theatre)

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Venue: Wharf 1 Sydney Theatre Company (Walsh Bay NSW), Jan 10 – 14, 2024, with further performances at Art House Wyong (January 19–20) and Merrigong Theatre Company in Wollongong (February 14–17)
Playwright: Alana Valentine
Director: Liesel Badorrek
Cast: Elenoa Rokobaro, Eleanor Stankiewicz
Images by Wendell Teodoro

Theatre review
Born 1900 in Sydney, Nellie Small worked many of her adult years as an entertainer, eventually establishing a career as a male impersonator in the 1930s. As a gender non-conformist, and a prominent person of colour living in Australia a century ago, Small remains an important figure in our queer history. Alana Valentine’s play in a cabaret style Send for Nellie, is an admirable attempt at immortalising the memory of Small. It is a respectful tribute, albeit offering a somewhat sanitized impression of Sydney nightlife.

At just an hour’s duration, with an abundance of song-and-dance incorporated into the staging, Send for Nellie is an excellent showcase for a performer like leading lady Elenoa Rokobaro, whose powerful vocals and precise execution of choreography, elevates the presentation with her exceptional polish. There is however an absence of a certain queer sensibility, that we know instinctively to be a crucial element in any recounting of Small’s life. Eleanor Stankiewicz plays several supporting characters, each one more vibrant than the last, but none of whom distract from the main attraction. Also a delight is the three-piece band of women musicians with Zara Stanton as Musical Director, although it is worth pointing out, that acoustics are a major sore point in this production.

Direction by Liesel Badorrek gives Send for Nellie an abundance of variation and movement, but the show never really connects. We feel as though the soul is missing, from a person we want to know better. On a positive note, visual design is generally of a high standard, for a work as handsome as the person it wishes to memorialise.

For the benefit of every person in queer communities, we must continue to tell stories about our forebears, in order that we may be inspired by their resilience, their resourcefulness and their innumerable achievements. We need always to see how as a people, we continually prove them wrong, that we are of great worth, that what they have construed of us for generations, is reprehensible and must always be met with resistance. To have survived her times as a queer person of colour, Nellie Small was unequivocally a warrior. It would not have been easy, but it does mean that greatness is absolutely within our grasp.

www.thearthousewyong.com.au