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Theatre

In 1983, actor Noni Hazlehurst was invited to London by Robyn Archer to be part of Archer’s new cabaret Cut and Thrust. Hazlehurst, less than a decade out of acting school and having just been fêted in Cannes for her performance of Nora in the film adaptation of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1982), was ‘thrilled to bits’.

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Published in November 2024, no. 470

Hamlet 

Diane Stubbings
Monday, 09 September 2024

Watching the denouement of Melbourne Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet, I was reminded of David Edgar’s 1980 stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby. Ensconced within the travelling theatrical company of Mr Vincent Crummles, Nicholas and his hapless companion Smike are cast in a production of Romeo and Juliet, Smike as the apothecary and Nicholas (of course) as Romeo.

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Published in ABR Arts

Topdog/Underdog 

Diane Stubbings
Wednesday, 28 August 2024

In The Forever Wars: America’s unending conflict with itself – a searing account of the ways in which the seeds of Trumpism and the MAGA movement reach back to the first throes of American nationhood (reviewed for ABR by Timothy J. Lynch) – journalist Nick Bryant characterises the narrative by which America defines itself as ‘a story of unrivalled national success, shared values, common purpose and continual progress’. The American story was, and is, a ‘blurring of history and folklore … [that] didn’t ask too many troubling questions’; The United States was, and is, a nation that ‘lives and contests its history’ with an unrivalled level of ‘passion and ferocity’.

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Published in ABR Arts

Uncle Vanya 

Clare Monagle
Thursday, 01 August 2024

Straddling broad comedy and genuine pathos, Uncle Vanya, first produced in 1899, is a very tricky play indeed. The main characters are mostly puffed up with delusion and fuelled by romantic fantasy. They use mordant self-deprecation alongside flights of fancy to express their dissatisfaction with their lot. The play encourages the audience to laugh at the evident gap between these characters’ vaulting sense of how special their lives ought to be relative to their actual lives of middling privilege, conducted in middling places. 

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Published in ABR Arts

Backstage with Cameron Lukey

Australian Book Review
Tuesday, 19 December 2023

Cameron Lukey is an Australian producer whose credits include acclaimed productions of 33 Variations at Melbourne’s Comedy Theatre in 2019 (starring Ellen Burstyn) and Angels in America at fortyfivedownstairs in 2017. He began his career as an opera singer and joined the team at fortyfivedownstairs in 2016. He was appointed Artistic Director of the theatre in 2023.

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In 1957, Michael Benthall, a director at the Old Vic, took a chance on a young woman straight out of drama school, casting her as Ophelia in a production of Hamlet starring John Neville and Coral Browne. I was lucky enough to be in the audience with my mother when Judi Dench, a velvet-voiced cherub in virginal white, made her début. An infinite variety of stage and film performances have gone by since then, but none has erased the memory of her stage presence that night.

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You could hardly ask for a better tour guide through the artistic travails and triumphs of the twentieth century. Born as the previous century was closing its shutters, Noël Coward dominated the London stage in the interwar years, butted heads with the Angry Young Men in the 1950s, before wrenching victory from the jaws of disfavour in his final years in a series of stunning revivals.

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Published in August 2023, no. 456

'I knew I was bright, but not special’, writes Zoë Caldwell early on in her pithy, telling memoir. Still earlier (indeed, in the first paragraph), she says that she knew, even from an early age, she was destined to perform: ‘ … to stand in front of people, keeping them awake and in their seats, by telling other people’s stories and using other people’s words. I knew this because it was the only thing I could do.’ There is a bit of self-deprecation in these words that is at loggerheads with what we have come to expect from actors’ memoirs, which are, more often than not, scribbled sentences rather than thoughtful paragraphs, and which tell us more about vanity, greed, self-indulgence, and the patience of the haunted ghost-writer than they do about the actor as a professional or a person. Actually, such books are like sets on some early television shows: bricks-and-mortar, but really canvas and plaster with wooden backing, which wobble every time somebody walks past. What they are not is true autobiography.

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Published in November 2001, no. 236

At last a history, thirty-two years after the event, of the Australian Performing Group (APG), albeit in the form of highly personal ‘recollections’ from Tim Robertson, one of the group’s stalwarts. The Pram Factory is a handsome, large-format book, containing many wonderful photographs recording the young radicals of the 1970s who created Australian theatre history.

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Here is all you ever wanted to know about Chinese theatre and didn’t know whom to ask! Who better anywhere to ask than Professor Colin Mackerras? A distinguished sinologist, Chairman of the School of Modem Asian Studies at Griffith University, he speaks Chinese fluently, taught English in Shanghai from 1964–66, and has visited China regularly since then totting up a remarkable miscellany of visits – to theatres, academies, conservatoria, cinemas, commune, and factory performances and talks with dramatists, critics, composers and ‘the masses’.

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Published in June 1982, no. 41