Meow Meow is a very different kinda kitten, with teeth and claws, which put her at the cutting-edge of what might be called alternative, or indie, cabaret.
Money and Friends is a gently scathing lampoon of those wealthy enough to have waterfront properties in Sydney and holiday houses down the coast, and how their greed is but one expression of their manifold personal shortcomings.
Close your eyes and Bri Cowlishaw will take you places familiar, new, nostalgic, painful, peaceful, visceral, and elsewhere. Places you've been. Places you've seen. And places known that look quite different, when viewed from her sharply-defined angle.
A gifted embroider of words, Friel combines soft lyricism and hard meaning in his play, a tragical comical historical pastoral on a spree and spoiling for a spirited spar.
In the care of Pinchgut Opera’s director, Erin Helyard, this music, formulaic as it indeed is in some respects, sprang off the page into an experience rich in emotions.
Contradiction, conundrum, conflict, racism, misogyny and homophobia run through this play like a main circuit cable snaking through a moral minefield of explosive allegation.