Concrete Playground

Alicia Talbots latest work, The Fence, is quite different to most other shows you’ll see in the Sydney Festival. For starters, in the venue listing where you would expect to see the names of places like “ The Seymour Centre” or “The Sydney Theatre” it simply says “A Backyard In Paramatta”.

For the last 4 years, Talbot's company Urban Theatre Projects has been creating hard-hitting and ambitious works of social and political theatre. They work with the local communities, using non actors to create the text together as a group. It’s a method that makes for unusually honest and illuminating productions.

Her last two Sydney Festival shows, Back Home (2006) and Last Highway (2008), were highlights of the programs, despite being locally made without any big names attached. Paramatta, especially a backyard in Paramatta, may seem a little out of the way from the usual Sydney theatre haunts but it’s worth the trek for this raw and intimate night of documentary theatre.