Diane Stubbings
Readers who encountered Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’ when it was first published in 1952 (as part of her short story collection The Apple Tree) would have heard in the story an echo of the German assault on Britain during World War II, images of rural England under attack from aggressive birds an apt metaphor for everything the country had recently endured. Yet what lifted the story from being merely an allegory of a past war to a tale that resonated – and continues to resonate – beyond its time is the cyclic nature of the birds’ incursions.
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To attack a pinata
Having just seen Bell Shakespeare’s Henry 5 in Melbourne – where it has this week opened – and reading so many flattering reviews of the production, I was beginning to wonder what I’d missed. It was therefore heartening to read Jonathan Ricketson’s (online) review which, for me, encapsulated the many flaws of the production as well as its few inspired moments. This was a king who did not seem to have the vigour to attack a pinata, let alone the Kingdom of France. More egregiously, this was a production that appeared to have nothing at all to say.
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Ireland’s now infamous ‘mother and baby homes’ have been the subject of several films. Aisling Walsh’s Sinners (2002), Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002), and Stephen Frear’s Philomena (2013), as well as numerous documentaries, have focused on the abuses suffered by the women detained in these homes and the fates of their children, many of them sold to wealthy families. According to the Irish Government’s 2021 Commission of Investigation into the homes, between 1922 and 1995, approximately 56,000 unmarried women and 57,000 children were detained, at least 9000 of the children not surviving their time in the institutions. As Claire Keegan writes in the Afterword to her 2021 novella, upon which this film is based, ‘Many girls and women lost their babies. Some lost their lives. Some or most lost the lives they would have had.’
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The Best Australian Science Writing 2024 edited by Jackson Ryan and Carl Smith
Let’s be clear about one thing from the outset. Any resemblance between this Melbourne Theatre Company musical adaptation of My Brilliant Career and the Miles Franklin novel of the same name seems, as times, purely coincidental.
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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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