Wonderful Piece of Theatre

New Zealand playwright Catherine Downes’ The Case of Katherine Mansfield, which was on in Glebe as part of the Sydney Fringe Festival, “is a simply wonderful piece of theatre — the kind that makes you believe in theatre,” Kirsty McGuire writes in a review of the play. “The play itself seems to be structured around two philosophies: The first is Mansfield’s own, ‘to acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure.’ [Rosanna] Easton portrays Mansfield’s bravery, or rather her determination not to acknowledge fear, wonderfully. The second philosophy is that that she led a largely ‘false life’. She chose what to remember and how to remember it, and in the retelling of her versions these memories they became true.”