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Tim Byrne

To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.  

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Late: A novel by Michael Fitzgerald

by
December 2023, no. 460

Michael Fitzgerald’s new novel, Late, opens with a camera obscura, a direct reference to Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The image is a nifty one – a portrait projected across the Pacific Ocean, as well as across time itself – and it goes some way to signalling the author’s intentions: he wants to create a novel deliberately weighted by the creative works (films, books, art, and sculpture) that have come before and, for his protagonist – who in real life died on 4 August 1962 – those that have come since.

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Did I Ever Tell You This? by Sam Neill & Everything and Nothing by Heather Mitchell

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August 2023, no. 456

Despite their proliferation, celebrity memoirs often seem incapable of justifying their own existence: a string of carefully curated anecdotes woven together to approximate a life already lived in the glare of the media. Perhaps because actors are on the one hand concealed by the roles they play, and on the other exposed to the prying eyes of the public, their autobiographies tend to inhabit a paradoxical netherworld of disclosure and obfuscation, cautious oscillations on a back off/come hither axis. Both Sam Neill’s and Heather Mitchell’s recent memoirs traverse this uneasy ground, feeding us sometimes incredibly intimate details while remaining stubbornly mute on the larger questions of their careers.

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The Son 

Transmission Films
by
07 February 2023
Given the success of the film adaptation of his previous play, The Father (2020), with an Academy Award-winning lead performance from Anthony Hopkins and a slew of nominations for himself, it seems only natural that writer–director Florian Zeller should turn to another in his trilogy of plays, The Son, for his next film project. (Zeller’s play, Le Fils, had its première in Paris in 2018.) Co-written by famed English playwright Christopher Hampton and shot by cinematographer Ben Smithard, who both worked on the earlier film, The Son represents, in many ways, a consolidation of Zeller’s talents, even if it doesn’t quite reach the harrowing intensity of The Father. ... (read more)

Wittenoom 

Red Stitch Actors' Theatre
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03 February 2023
The degazetted former township of Wittenoom, 1,420 kilometres north-north-east of Perth, stands like a dark shadow on the lungs of Australian mining, less an isolated blight than a synecdoche for the exploitation and avarice of the industry as a whole. It was named by Lang Hancock himself, created in 1947 by his company Australian Blue Asbestos Pty Ltd, and was directly responsible for the death of more than 2,000 people. It is a potent and ghostly setting for Mary Anne Butler’s play of the same name. ... (read more)

To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.  

... (read more)

Cyrano 

Melbourne Theatre Company
by
30 September 2022

In Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), a handful of people enter a stage during a rehearsal and begin to break down the very structures of theatre itself. They question not just the verisimilitude of acting but the essentialism of character, the idea that we are ever any one thing fixed in time. It is a concept that animates Virginia Gay’s free adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897): this is a tragic hero who pushes at the confines of their assigned role, daring to imagine not just an alternate ending but an entirely new way of being Cyrano.

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The Comedy of Errors 

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18 July 2022

One thing is certain: Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors is flat out hilarious, and if it isn’t funny enough on stage, it’s the fault of the production. His only farce, it is often thought to be an early work, but it is surely far too assured to be written before 1594. It’s entirely free of the striving Marlovian rhetoric that hampers the Henry VI plays (commenced in 1591), and it is cleaner, cleverer, and more convincing than The Taming of the Shrew (probably before 1592). It is based on Plautus’s Menaechmi ...

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The Amateurs 

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05 July 2022

It opens outside the tiny wooden box that is Red Stitch’s St Kilda home; the actors come towards us with torches blazing, in medieval masks. What follows is a brief pageant, a morality play that breaks down when one of the players falls victim to a mysterious pestilence – although it’s clear from the catch in the other actors’ voices that this contagion is not entirely unexpected. The actor drops, and his sister must be wrenched from his fallen body before she too succumbs. The plague is about, and all anyone can do is run.

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Come Rain or Come Shine 

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27 June 2022

English Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro has had several works translated into film – notably The Remains of the Day (1993) and Never Let Me Go (2010) – but Melbourne Theatre Company’s Come Rain or Come Shine is the first stage musical based on his work. One of five short stories on the theme of music and nightfall that make up the collection Nocturnes (2009), it’s an odd little tale of friendship and failure that careens from the gently elegiac to the outright farcical, like F. Scott Fitzgerald via Michael Frayn.

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