Theatre news, reviews and what's on

''Outside Mullingar'' has many of the elements we have come to expect of Irish plays: rural gloom, family feuds, inheritance anxiety, rain, mud, depression and grimly eloquent humour. But it spares us the darker peat-bog horrors, and has a softer centre than most.

Acting needs a completely different mindset from directing a play, says Lara Macgregor.

There's so much happening on the stage that it's hard to know where to look.

Wafting incense, an organic light show playing above a dimly lit stage, traditional Beijing opera sound and movements and tactile instrumental sounds stunned the full house at the Glenroy Auditorium into silent reverence.

The set depicts a shabby, not very tidy flat where a newly single actor has come to roost. We can tell his wife has kicked him out because of the messages that arrive on his phone.

The name Jane Austen will never again evoke genuine thoughts of genteel Regency etiquette, decorum and desirable but unobtainable suitors.

Seats were sold out for an evening in Olveston's drawing room with its splendid Steinway grand piano and backdrop of trees clothed in spring growth beyond the leadlight bay window. 

Selilia Pusiaki's Sei 'O Fafine opened last night, with the first of two performances. It was an interesting work, based on a rather simple storyline: a family of Tongan women over the year following the death of their father and husband.

A thoroughly engaged and captivated audience at Olveston attended the performance of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's narrative poem, Enoch Arden.

Sara McDougall's play Moon at the Bottom of the Garden, had the audience laughing with glee and recognition and weeping at the pain of addiction through generations, solo-parenting and family secrets creating divides.

An unusual collaboration: Dunedin's Ake Ake Theatre Company has teamed up with Belgrade's Hleb (Bread) Teatar to explore some little-known aspects of World War 1 and the ways in which it affected Serbians and New Zealanders.

Beyond, from Queensland-based company Circa, opened its two-night season as part of Arts Festival Dunedin last night.