STORIES OF LOVE & HATE

Most turf wars are about hate, sure. But they can also be about love, about wanting to preserve a feeling of belonging to a place, of community. Sometimes the result of all that hate and love is jazz hands – West Side Story, anyone? – but sometimes it is the ugly, racist rhetoric of the  Cronulla Riots. These are the lines – between love and hate, between us and them – that director Roslyn Oades treads in Stories of Love and Hate, created by Sydney’s Urban Theatre Projects with the communities in Bankstown and the Sutherland Shire and staged as part of the Sydney Theatre Company’s education series. The production presents the individual stories that made up that summer using what the STC dubs ‘Headphone Verbatim’: performers wear headphones and speak along to a carefully edited audio script; they channel multiple characters and embody real-life stories, word for word, recreating every cough and quirk of human speech with authenticity. Stories is not about judgement, nor is it a rehashing of the collective communal guilt that rung around our city that summer. Rather, Oades takes as her starting place the idea that hate can be born when what we love risks disappearing. (ST)

Until June 3, Wharf 2, Sydney Theatre Company, Pier 4, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay, $21, 9250 1777, sydneytheatre.com.au