Julius Caesar, first performed in 1599, dates from the period when Shakespeare was leading up to Hamlet, and its central figure Brutus, the conscientious assassin, is a bit of a rough draft for the introspective side of the Prince of Denmark, whereas Richard II, four years earlier ...

I don’t watch the World Cup or even Wimbledon, so I may have some Australian gene missing. But by the time the string quartet winners were announced at the end of the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition last week, I had become a fan, almost a barracker. I was rooting for the ...

In this fortnight's Update: The winners of the Helpmann Awards, Der Rosenkavalier, Stuart Skelton's début album, John Bell in The Miser, a Bette Midler caberet, Geoffrey Rush pulling out of Twelfth Night, the Tarrawarra Biennial, the Melbourne International Film Festival program, and some giveaways ...

Strange and terrible events unfold around us. Conflicts erupt; catastrophes occur; a billionaire reality television performer reminiscent of a snake oil merchant is elected president of the United States. Following these destabilising forces, a chorus comprised of dissonant tones of reproach and plea often emerges ...

In this fortnight's Update: Anne Sophie-Mutter, a major new Indigenous art exhibition, the World Cup of chamber music, the Louise Crossley Conducting Workshop, glitter at MWF, ACMI and Film Victoria's Series Mania, the Archibald Prize in Geelong, the $30,000 Ursula Hoff Fellowshop, the Art Music Awards announcement, Brook Andrew, and giveaways from MSO, the Queensland Theatre, and Transmission Films ...

The two hundredth anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) has given rise to a predictable slew of new reflections and reappraisals offering a twenty-first-century context to this seminal work. None was written with more erudition or acuity than ...

One would have hoped that in the four years since Jada Alberts’s fine début play Brothers Wreck premièred at Belvoir Street that its concern with the issue of Indigenous despair would have come to feel less vital, and yet the problem is as acute as ever. This week we learned that every child in detention in the Northern Territory, where Brothers Wreck is set, is Indigenous ...