Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca (1938) opens with one of the most iconic lines in literature (and, thanks to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 adaptation, one of the most iconic lines in cinema): ‘Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.’

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s program was a feast of late Romanticism preceded by an entrée from the mid-Romantic period. The opener was the Overture to Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), composed in 1841, when Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann were at the height of their creativity.

It says something about the general mood in the United States at present that there is a sense of foreboding even in a town as ostentatiously laid back as Santa Fe. The locals are as friendly and eager to chat as ever, but inevitably the first question to emerge when I explain my accent is: ‘What do you Aussies think about our situation here?’ – an echo of the question that used to be asked of foreigners, seconds after they landed in Australia. This insecurity from a nation that used to be supremely indifferent to foreign opinion is a sign of the disquietude of the Trump era.

In his Broadway debut, sexagenarian Keanu Reeves has reunited with Alex Winter – his co-star from the Bill & Ted film trilogy (1989, 1991, 2020) – for Jamie Lloyd’s bold, minimalist production of Samuel Beckett’s classic. Hollywood stars seeking to prove their mettle on the stage can wrong-foot fans, opting for experimental fare, but this tendency is strangely fitting in Waiting for Godot, a play devoid of traditional exposition, in which confusion reigns supreme.

Maura Delpero’s The Mountain Bride – Vermiglio was the winner of the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. It is a film of austere beauty, as fragile as it is forceful. Set in the Trentino village of Vermiglio in 1944, it conjures a community perched on the edge – geographically at the border of Switzerland and Austria, historically at the close of World War II, and spiritually at the uneasy threshold between tradition and change.

Archie Moore’s kith and kin is an immersive, dark installation created within a black-painted building – a replica of the Australian pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale – that itself sits inside a voluminous wing of Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA). The ‘pavilion’ becomes its own discrete space. An adjacent high window allows natural sunlight and views of the sky. In Venice, the doors opened to the canal; within GOMA, this sky view is as close as the installation gets to nature. Not far from the installation, however, you can overlook Maiwar/the Brisbane River; water flowing around the globe connects these two places. Once inside the exhibition space, your eyes gradually adjust to the darkness.

One of the great strengths of the Mystery Road series has been its ability to distil complex social relationships, with deep historical roots in racism, into compelling dramatic narratives. Mystery Road: Origin Season 2 continues this work of taking a scalpel to aspects of Australian society that hide uncomfortable truths but, unlike the previous seasons, in which Detective Jay Swan confronts a violent criminal underbelly, this season shifts focus to explore the more ‘respectable’ violence embedded in the health and welfare systems, in a country town where First Nations residents live alongside those who were instrumental in enforcing the policy of assimilation.

Perhaps more than any other composer, Dmitri Shostakovich’s music is a window onto his life and times. His Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93, completed in 1953, is generally seen as his response to the death of Joseph Stalin months earlier. Shostakovich said in his memoir, Testimony (1979), that it was about Stalin, though he had been working on it prior to Stalin’s death.

In her classic work of speculative fiction ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ (1973), Ursula Le Guin forces us to ask what – or who – we are prepared to sacrifice in order to build our utopias. Le Guin describes Omelas as a place of great beauty and happiness. A place that is joyous and ordered, that needs no kings. The people of Omelas are ‘mature, intelligent, passionate’, and there is no grief or misery in their lives. Crucially, Le Guin invites her readers to contribute to the imagining of this utopia, thereby implicating us in the substantial cost of building and maintaining it. As the story reveals, the bliss of Omelas is founded on the suffering of a starved and neglected child locked in a ‘foul-smelling’ underground closet. The child begs and screams, ‘Please let me out. I will be good!’

You can make the case that Othello’s handkerchief is the most consequential prop in all of Shakespeare. Yorick’s skull and Macbeth’s floating dagger are more iconic, but neither is integral to the action of the plays in which they feature. The handkerchief, on the other hand, really is the whole of the tragedy of Othello.