Working as a theatre director my job is to unify and synthesise all the artistic elements of a performance. These elements may be music, physical images, puppetry, text, improvisation, digital media and a range of performers.

From a performance in a domestic living room to a large scale event on a pier, I am skilled at creating theatre that is powerful, cohesive, surprising, satisfying, and that tells a story with heart.

link to more images of shows

Quotes from reviews:

Personal

"Personal is precisely what it says on the packet: an idiosyncratic account of a particular social identity, simultaneously unique and representative. It’s evident that Codas will find heaps to identify with, but it’s also highly informative and moving for the rest of us. Mundy employs a variety of techniques to draw us into her world, and expertly delivers on her pact with the audience. It’s that rarest of things: a lean, punchy show that could easily accommodate more content.

There’s a delightful sense of the analogue about the play, even while it dazzles technically (the sound design by Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, and the video design by Rhian Hinkley are second to none). A long opening section involves soundless Super 8 footage of Mundy’s family projected onto cardboard boxes. At first, it looks like footage every family would take; only gradually do we get a sense that this family is different, as mum and dad sign happy birthday, for example. Later, we get footage of Mundy and her primary school teacher conducting an interview about the peculiar technologies that help her parents function in the modern world: doorbells connected to lights, and typewriters connected to telephones.

All of this is adorably daggy, as Mundy silently acknowledges, but it contains some hints of sadness too. Functioning as a bridge between the deaf and hearing worlds isn’t an easy or looked-for role for a young person, especially a very young person. A Skype conversation with her deaf brother Gavin reveals the extent of her parents’ needs; as a four-year old Mundy is co-opted into the role of translator for complex and age inappropriate transactions. When she asks him how he thinks this impacted on her personality, he simply says, “it made you a better translator”.

It’s an observation both revealing and true; Mundy is a beautiful translator, crossing back and forth between the worlds of the hearing and the hearing impaired with consummate ease. There are sections of the play that are totally dependent on sound, and sections that one has to be proficient in Auslan to understand. She always signs before she speaks, and sometimes she doesn’t translate at all, which is the most eloquent way of realigning priorities. While she is standing in for a whole community, she never comes across as more than representative of her own experience. Anthony Burgess said that all translation is degrees of loss, but Mundy gives the impression that we are gaining something by speaking without words."

Tim Byrne, Time Out 9/4/18

The Concert

" The satire and caricature is gentle and subtle, suggesting, as the best clowning does, that these men are sadly but mercifully oblivious to their many inadequacies... ...The Concert is a show at the high-quality end of the Comedy Festival - a real treat."

Helen Thomson, The Age 1/4/03

The Corridor

“Merophie Carr has carefully built the performance (of The Corridor), carefully balancing the ebb and flow of energy. It is delicate, intimate, yet also inclusive, embracing the audience rather than positioning them passively…. It played to a packed house and the audience definitely left the richer for the experience. It deserves a more substantial run......It becomes our experience also, expanding our emotional vocabulary – something that art at its best should do." 

Hillary Crampton, The Age 27/2/06

 Mantalk

"It's a dialogue about what it means to be a man (without the New Age chest-thumping the phrase usually connotes) that ripples with gently surreal comedy and sincere emotion.....

Directors Merophie Carr and Thalia Thomas have achieved a flow as natural as pub talk. The chat is so free-wheeling and alive it's hard to tell where the script ends and improvisation begins."

Cameron Woodhead, The Age 2/10/06

Die Roten Punkte

"Complete with bad German accents, amateurish guitar thrashing and drum bashing, they’re a crazy mix of early ‘80s bands such as Nena, who made the hit 99 Luftballons and Sigue Sigue Sputnick, with Iggy Pop-esque posing from Otto, Bjork attitude from Astrid, and some truly awful angst-ridden songs. The parody is well observed, the sulky sibling dynamics wonderfully awkward, and the level of self-delusion spot-on."

Tim Hunter The Age 3/10/06

Hungry for You

"This visually stunning and sophisticated piece of story-telling blends actors, shadow and bunraku puppetry, live cooking, and projections to take us into the world of glamorous celebrity chef and food artist extraordinaire Pippa Corelli…..

The set, puppets and design of Ros Wren are inspiring, the rice paper body lit from the inside an absolute vision on stage. Along with the satirical film clips, cooking cams and atmospheric lighting from Jason James, they together create a crisp and lush aesthetic for the whole piece. This slides seamlessly from the designer-kitchen fun of TV-world into the viscerality of laboratory-land and finally to the gothic black-mass meditation of the last scene. Hungry for You is brave and challenging, it’s full of surprises, floating in my memory and leaving me thinking long after I have left the theatre."

Gai Anderson, Write Response, 4/12/2012