Letters from Animals

by Kit Lazaroo, directed by Jane Woollard.

‘Australian playwright Kit Lazaroo has won several awards for her work in recent years. Letters from Animals showcases the striking originality of her imagination. The play is a dystopian black comedy set in a future where animals have become extinct. Control over human society is vested in an Orwellian bureaucracy – one that issues memory-erasing drugs to keep the population pliant, and insulates it from environmental havoc by erecting splendid metropolises. ...The Storeroom and Here Theatre have done justice to this beguiling and original new play.’

Cameron Woodhead, The Age, 15 November 2007

‘a simple but beautifully realised production. It’s much more difficult to write about than it is to see; it's a delicate, complex work that can seem merely whimsical, when in fact a bleak and uncompromising intelligence runs through it like a steel rod.

 …

What counts most in making this imaginative world are the performances, and all three actors are equal to the task. Georgina Capper in particular, in the double role of the disintegrating bureaucrat Shelley and the French Vulture, is an actor I want to see more of. Director Jane Woollard deftly evokes Lazaroo's elliptical realities with the help of a lot of smoke, Bronwyn Pringle’s ingenious lighting, several buckets and an evocative sound design.

It’s an exemplary demonstration of how theatre can be political and contemporary without being didactic or simplistic. In short, it rocks

Alison Croggon, Theatre Notes, 19 November 2007

Cast: Glynis Angell, Georgina Capper, Hai Ha Le

Design: Amanda Johnson

Lighting: Bronwyn Pringle

Music/Sound: Jane Woollard & Colin James

Photography: Josephine Harkin