The Secret Room REVIEWS
Roberta Bosetti directed

by Renato Cuocolo

Not in 20 odd years of theatre going have I been stirred as I have been
by this performance.
Helen Thomson ABC Radio National

An extraordinary show . Such a powerful experience for both actor and
audience that you find yourself talking about it for years afterword .
Mary Lou Jobart ABC Radio National

An extraordinary show easily the best of this period.
Geoffrey Milne ABC3LO Arts Today

The Secret Room is no ordinary theatre experience. It invites us silently to become complicit in Renato Cuocolo 's and Roberta Bosetti's world of intense, personal disclosure. Emotions and constructs flow seamlessly in and out of each other, giving Bosetti a magnificent text to invest with her inordinate dramatic powers. Bosetti's exquisite physicality and poignant sorrows grab you by the throat.
This is a terribly risky undertaking. The risks are all worth taking and the results, philosophical and dramaturgical, are extraordinary and reveal Cuocolo at his creative and directorial best.
Lee Christofis The Australian

Something special happened to me last week :something I did not expect and something I did. A woman I thought I knew welcomed me into her new home......... We were engaging in the ultimate betrayal, a betrayal she had suffered night after night, as a child in her family home....and now we were players in her pain, voyeurs at her crucifixion. That was the deal. And if we peered? And if we studied her undeniable beauty, her sensuality, were we, too, complicity?
She was vulnerable and strong. She was angry and passionate. She was not a victim. She was a woman regaining control by losing control. I laughed, I cried, I was confused, I was angry, I was invigorated.
Without ceremony, it ended. We were stunned. We needed to debrief. We decided, we strangers, to talk about what we had seen, what we had heard. Something special had happened: something we had expected, something we had not.
Gabriella Coslovich The Age

We are all seated within touching distance of her, hardly breathing. The tension that is generated by the erasure of distinctions between public and private performance is extraordinary. The Secret Room it is unmistakably marked with Cuocolo's challenging style, in this case ritualizing the domestic and the personal to define a new theatrical intimacy. Roberta Bosetti's performance is mesmerizing, not only in the secret room but also in the curiously unsettling “first act” of apparently normal social discourse. And this is the whole point of the performance: to disclose the psychosexual drama that informs at times the most innocuous of ordinary acts. An extraordinary show.
Helen Thomson The Age

  Seated at the table, the woman is slicing an onion, very finely, one slice at a time. The sound of the knife cutting through to the chopping board seems to echo around the small room. Occasionally the woman scatters the onion segments over a very large animal heart in a dish. She ‘s crying of course- onions have that effect. And when a tear starts to run down her cheek, she collects it with a silver teaspoon and drinks it. It's an arresting, provoking image, made even more intense because of its closeness. Bosetti gives a brilliant performance with enormous subtlety and nuance ,   delivering a tour the force that is literally in your face. An extraordinarily intimate and original performance experience.
Stephen Dunne The Sydney Morning Herald

Today's best. The week's best. Critic's picks. Best of the best.
Arts Section The Sydney   Morning Herald

Bosetti is able to make us smile and whimper in the same breath. Her performance and Cuocolo's direction are based on physical   emotional style, which demands enormous effort from the actor.
It forces one to asses the nature of performance, the nature of femaleness and the depth of our secrecy in a world that demands we remain safe and protected.
Kate Herbert   Herald Sun

Venture into The Secret Room if you dare.But beware you risk unearthing memories of your past and visions of your future.
Bosetti performs brilliantly. She manages to blur the line between reality and fiction so we are never sure who she really is.
Rob Gravestocks The Melbourne Times

This is theatre that is powerful, confronting and mesmerizing. Bosetti vulnerability is palpable and its control unwavering. The house comes to resemble the corridors of her mind and dark solitude of the memories she shared. There is no way to resist her performance which is always commanding, utterly believable, honest and beautifully measured. Bosetti is a fine actors and proves that theatre does not need a 500-seat auditorium. It is a place of imagination and emotional activity.
Catherine Lambert Sunday Herald Sun

Gavin said maybe the theatre wasn't dead after all; maybe it was just a little sick and it needed a couple of shocks. I said the theatre would survive, as long as there were always experimental shows that challenged the emotions and the intellect like the IRAA production of The Secret Room.
Danny Katz The Age

  It is only possible to write about “The Secret Room” at a meta level because to write about the rich theatricality, the potent visual imagery and the dense language is to betray the secret at its heart.
The events it deals with are shocking and intensely personal but the experience has been shaped as a beautiful, delicate and erotic work of art, layered with resonant images where nothing that we see or hear is accidental or casual. It is unconformable, disturbing because the boundaries are blurred between private life and public life, the domestic interior and the infinity of cyberspace, the performer and her life, the audience and the guest, intimates and strangers.
Suzanne Spunner Real Time

  Roberta tells a story that is shocking, sometimes harrowing, but with moment of humor and hope. It is a breathtaking experience for the watcher to see her go through the emotional wringer and out the other side. Bosetti gives an astonishing performance, expressing an emotionally volatile story that has the ring of truth to it. Her voluptuous confidence, strength of character and sincerity are deeply moving.

The Secret Room is something unusual, confronting, incredibly engaging, and a fine example of how theatre can reach right into your heart and give it a tug.
Tim Richards Stage Left

Ultimately, we are to be witnesses to the most remarkable, intense and surreal of “confessional” one woman performances certainly I've ever experienced. This is European theatre at its most intimate yet intimidating, profound yet prosaic. Food and love, meant to nourish, betrays the child, who becomes the woman who must relinquish food for two years until ..until ....
Share a meal with Roberta Bosetti and experience theatre as you will experience it nowhere else.
Michael Smith The Drum Media
 

The conversation from the dinner table suddenly pertinent, woven through the fabric of the intimate personal story she shared. Roberta had created a potent an empathic bond beyond ordinary theatrical experience. “The Secret Room” is a confronting, unique, powerful theatre surprise.
Neil Litchfield Stage Whispers

The Secret Room in Europe

It is in many ways an unforgettable evening. An event where fiction cancels its borders with reality: and it 's poetic, it is like a light entangling shiver.
Alfonso Cipolla La Repubblica

Cuocolo has the visionary power of the best David Lynch's nightmares.
Claus Philipp Der Standard Vienna

An interesting and enthralling performance, based on a solid dramaturgy, a direction that knows how to strike at the heart with simple gestures but full of meaning and an actress capable of unveiling the dense mystery in everyone's secret room.
Magda Poli Corriere della Sera

It ‘s over. The catharsis has been achieved. The pyre (the auto-da-fe) has not led to the flames, but to the tears, the somatic deformation, the recapture of a sorrow which obviously still hurts. Bosetti is upset. We are troubled. We leave the house and only by the time we are in better spirits we dare thinking how good, perfect and sweetly homicidal she has been.
Osvaldo Guerrieri La Stampa

Roberta Bosetti , a very talented actress, transforms the related facts into pure emotion, first by concealing them with her modesty, then by turning them into a burning body. A surprising result, full of expressive energy and a confirmation that theatre, even in its most unusual forms like this one, escorts life and enlightens its paths.
Mirella Caveggia L'Unita '

A play of autobiographical massacre. And theatre happens inside you, like a mood. a kind of uneasiness rising with the thoughts reflected on that double-cross of autobiography and dramaturgy typical of real life stories.
Carlo Infante Carta

An unforgettable image. In the purest silence. It is here that you realize that you are on the brink of no return. It is here that the visit to the house, the story, the descent into the past begins. It is here that the sea begins. It is the abyss. But is sweet. Along words which are like the rope of the well pulling you up and down. A hell from where you can come on but that cannot be forgotten. Roberta Bosetti is everything.
Gian Luca Favetto Diario , La Repubblica

The ordinary is not ordinary. It is extraordinarily uncanny.