Lacrima

by Caroline Guiela Nguyen

seen at the Roslyn Packer Theatre Sydney on 23 January 2026

The Théâtre national de Strasbourg on tour for the Sydney Festival presented Lacrima, written and directed by Caroline Guiela Nguyen. 

A wedding dress has been commissioned for a (fictional) English princess; an atelier in Paris is to design and make the dress while an antique veil is to be taken from the V&A and repaired by the lacemakers of Alençon (successors to its original makers), and the train is to be embroidered with thousands of pearls in Mumbai. The complexity of the commission and the high-handed demands of the royal household collide with intense personal problems in Paris and emerging health issues in Alençon and Mumbai. The whole situation is increasingly tense as deadlines approach and impossible decisions have to be made.

The play was brilliantly presented in a set designed by Alice Duchange which principally evoked the atelier in Paris, with subtle changes for the other locations and a clever use of cameras to focus on particular characters or represent others not physically present (the dress designer, for example, a man-child wrapped up in self-glorification at the expense of all around him). The gradual emergence of the dress, created from swathes of cloth mounted on a mannequin, was almost like an evolving character in itself, a silent witness to the dramas surrounding it.  

The play was performed almost entirely in French, with some Tamil and English; luckily subtitles were shown on the screen used for the camera projections and matched by surtitles above the stage. Despite the added levels of concentration needed to follow the English text the audience remained completely attentive to an evening of high drama, a probing insight into all sorts of exploitation in the global rag trade and the human cost involved in creating a fabulously extravagant article of clothing which would only be worn once.

Anthem

by Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, Christos Tsiolkas and Irine Vela, with assistance by Bryan Andy

seen at the Roslyn Packer Theatre (Sydney) on 15 January 2020

Susie Dee directs a cast of fourteen in this work of joint authorship presenting a slice of various Australian lives as crystallised on train journeys made (mostly) in Melbourne. Each author created scenes from observed situations on trains, the results being woven together as a series of interlinked episodes unified by musical threads composed by Irine Vela.

A previous project from 1998 called Who's Afraid of the Working Class? has provided the springboard for the current work, which the authors claim to be tougher, with 'no moments of redemption or reassurance .... unrelenting in the conclusions it draws'. They are certainly right about the tone, which veers from rueful acceptance of the grind of commuting on crowded trains to the raw anger of cultural and class repression with very few lighter moments to relieve the sense of frustration and rage hiding barely beneath the surface. 

The White Album

by Joan Didion

seen at the Roslyn Packer Theatre (Sydney) on 11 January 2020

Lars Jan and the Early Morning Opera group devised this staged adaptation of Joan Didion's celebrated essay on culture and counter-culture in the 1960s, with Mia Barron taking the principal part of reciting the text, five others taking minor parts, and a score or so of 'volunteers' providing the crowd background. It is part of this year's Sydney Festival.

On a bare stage with a wide box-like space at the back fronted by perspex floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding doors people mill about until the performance starts. Then an introductory exercise stills the cast (and the audience) and the recitation begins. Some aspects of the events Didion recounts and ruminates upon are acted out, or emblematically evoked, either on the stage or within the box: there is a particularly effective use of the white wall at the back to create slogans during the sequence concerning university sit-ins, and a slow motion enactment of gun violence in relation to the Manson murders.