Review - 100 Reasons for War

La Mama Presents

100 Reasons for War

(War, What is it Good For?)

By Tom Holloway

Directed by Bob Pavlich

Lighting Designer – Tom Willis

Lighting and Sound Operator – Julian Adams

Stage Manager – Rebecca Bassett

Costume co-ordinator – Bethany Tweedale

Set co-ordinator – Elysia Janssen

Photography – Matthew Howat

Videos made by Bethany Tweedale (Beginning of the Universe)

And Elysia Janssen (Bliss Symbolics)

Performed by Joshua Brodrick, Meghalee Bose, Walter Dyson, Marnie Henderson, Elysia Janssen, Karanvir Malhotra, Simon Nixon, David Peters, Lucy Rees, Jessica Sterck and Bethany Tweedale

La Mama

June 21 to June 25 - 2017

This production by La Trobe’s Student Theatre is most impressive and completely engaging.  Performed by eleven young adults with clarity and poise.  This is a testament to the skills of Director Bob Pavlich as a very experienced director of Student Theatre having been the Artistic Director of Student Theatre and Film at Latrobe University for 21 years. 

All performers present a lovely fresh clear presence and deliver their dialogue with lucid conviction in a comfortable uncluttered manner.  Each of these individuals is either a consummate theatre maker or very successful academic students or both. 

Eveningwear is worn as a kind of ‘blacks’ – highlighting individuality and yet fashioning a sort of uniformity at the same time.  Doubtless each audience member picks favorite players but everybody ‘stands out’ to a similar degree.

The focus flows from one featured person to another.  This allows the audience to be comfortably positioned to think about the text.  Much of which is Australian playwright Tom Holloway’s but there are some excerpts from other sources.

There is an ambiguity about how this text connects directly to war - although discord is often expressed.   Many of the duologues that follow swiftly on the heels of each other speak of self-interest and disconnectedness, disruption and pending violence.

The choice of music by Director Bob Pavlich is great and there is an extraordinary piece of animation by Bliss Symbolics that works as a kind of bookend with the initial video about to brutal beginning of the universe.  In a way it is this initial video that introduces the hypothesis that we come from a mercilessly ferocious beginning  - violence begets violence.

This season has ended and was fully booked out.

Excellent Student Theatre from La Trobe University – congratulations!

Suzanne Sandow

(For Stage Whispers)