A week ago, on the stage of the Joan Sutherland Theatre, a desperate tenor killed his soprano lover in a blind, frustrated fury. This week the tenor hero is killed – if that is the right way to characterise it – by the soprano who loves him, but a different complex of emotions accompanies this operatic death as he dies blessing her.

Since its creation in 2010, Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour’s White Rabbit, Red Rabbit has achieved the unlikeliest of theatrical fates: it is understood to be both experimental and successful. It has been performed in more than thirty languages and by actors as starry as Michael Sheen, Stephen Fry, and Whoopi Goldberg. As with several of Soleimanpour’s other works, White Rabbit – presented by the Malthouse Theatre in 2013 – relied on the conceit that it is performed each night by a different actor who has never seen the script before, thus generating a particular kind of frisson by amplifying the audience’s uncertainty and sense of uncovering the text along with the unrehearsed performer.

It is noteworthy that two of the operas in Opera Australia’s current season, Bizet’s Carmen and Puccini’s La Bohème, are among the five most performed operas, perhaps only rivaled by Verdi’s La Traviata. The website Operabase, viewed by many as the most authoritative opera performance information site, lists these three with Mozart’s The Magic Flute and Puccini’s Tosca as the top five. Director Peter Brook, when asked in 1983 about his choice to stage a new Carmen rather than any other opera, observed: ‘Out of the ten most popular operas, there is one that is the most popular – Carmen. And it’s not only an opera; it’s a phenomenon.’

There is no escaping the sensation that Phyllis Herman, the matriarch of Paula Vogel’s Mother Play: A play in five evictions, is a woman we have met before. Her familiarity can be traced, through the work of American playwrights such as Tracy Letts and Jon Robin Baitz, all the way back to Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. Even Edward Albee’s ferocious ‘mother’ Martha who, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), feigns she has a college-age son, might recognise something of herself in Vogel’s creation.

While vastly different in tone, scope, and geography, El 47 and Through Rocks and Clouds (titled Raíz in Spanish) offer complementary visions of resistance – one overtly political, the other quietly poetic. Together, they provide a rich entry point into contemporary Spanish and Indigenous language cinema, balancing crowd-pleasing drama with subtle, art-house storytelling.

Operas come in all shapes, sizes, and venues. Having just returned from a visit to New York’s Metropolitan Opera House to see the final performance of an outstanding production of American John Adams’s new opera, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, it was quite an adjustment to see fellow American Nico Muhly’s latest opera, Aphrodite, commissioned and staged by Sydney Chamber Opera at their usual venue, Sydney’s Carriageworks. Adams’s opera calls for many soloists, supplemented by a large chorus and orchestra; Muhly’s work involves two singers and seven instrumentalists. The Metropolitan is the largest opera house in the world; Carriageworks is rather more intimate.

We are perhaps finally within sight of the superhero genre’s demise. Declining box office, scandal, oversaturation, and ill-advised reboots have all contributed to a sense that, as one notable trade magazine recently put it, ‘super burn out’ is upon us

Long before the concept of autofiction entered the conversation, Helen Garner was confronting the messy chaos of existence in a manner that managed to be at once analytical and empathetic. In novels like Monkey Grip (1977) and in-depth reporting like This House of Grief  (2014), she balanced her clear-eyed observance of facts with an almost clinical dissection of her feelings arising from them. 

Now in its fifth year, Melbourne’s RISING has entrenched itself in Australia’s festival calendar. Emerging from the ashes of the Melbourne Festival and White Night, it has survived two Covid-19-aborted iterations to become, alongside Sydney’s Vivid and Hobart’s Dark Mofo, a key midwinter arts and culture assembly. 

‘Who wants to hear Samson et Dalila?’ Bernard Shaw asked rhetorically (in typically lordly fashion) after a concert version of Camille Saint-Saëns’s opera in 1893, the first time it was presented in Britain. ‘I respectfully suggest, Nobody.’ So Shavianly sure was the comic-curmudgeon that he left after Act Two.