Reviews: Woyzeck, Tom Ballard Is What He Is, Little Black Bastard
It struck me a moment ago - as I typed the names of the three very different shows I caught over the course of three days last week in the title of this blog post, above - that despite their differences, there is a unifying thread that links all three, tenuous as it may be. Woyzeck sees the eponymous character's pysche broken down and destroyed by the machinery of the military; 19 year old Warnambool expat Tom Ballard's stand-up show Is What He Is focuses on Ballard's coming out as gay in a country town; and Noel Tovey's remarkable monologue Little Black Bastard is a story of indigenous survival in the face of sometimes shocking abuse and deprivation in the 1940s and 50s. All three productions, then, are in one way or another about the struggle to maintain one's sense of self in the face of sometimes overwhelming odds... not that that's necessarily relevant to each work individually, but taken collectively, it's an amusing coincidence, don't you thin...