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Recent reviews

Film  |  Theatre  |  Art  |  Opera  |  Music  |  Television  |  Festivals

Welcome to ABR Arts, home to some of Australia's best arts journalism. We review film, theatre, opera, music, television, art exhibitions – and more. Reviews remain open for one week before being paywalled.

Sign up to ABR Arts and receive longform arts criticism to your inbox every fortnight on Tuesdays. And if you are interested in writing for ABR Arts, tell us about your passions and your expertise.

 

Recent reviews

Romeo and Julie 

Red Stitch Actors' Theatre
by •
25 July 2024
Belinda McClory as Barb and Damon Baudin as Romy (photograph by Jodie Hutchinson)
In the fair town of Splott, not far from the sprawling Cardiff steelworks, where we lay our scene, two teenagers meet cute in a crowded cafeteria. She’s a chirpy high school kid with a big brain who dreams of going to Cambridge to study physics. He’s a dropout and a single father who lives with his alcoholic mum in a shabby bedsit. ... (read more)

The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge 

Musica Viva
by •
25 July 2024
King's College Choir (photograph by James Grant)
The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, arguably the world’s most famous choir, is undertaking another Australian tour. It is travelling with two programs, both of which include a variety of music from the late Renaissance to the present day, and is performing in all mainland state capitals, as well as the national capital. ... (read more)

Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch

Art Gallery of South Australia
by •
23 July 2024
Brent Harris born Palmerston North, New Zealand 4 October 1956 I weep my mother’s breasts 1996, Melbourne oil on linen 57.0 x 96.7 cm; Courtesy of the artist and Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington © Brent Harris
Art travels, or it does not – in the latter case, often unjustly. Artists known in one country are not always visible beyond it, just as national cultures of literature and music often develop and remain supported entirely from within. This does not mean, however, that the artists, writers, and musicians themselves are untravelled, nor that their individual practices evolve in ignorance of what is happening elsewhere. ... (read more)

Cost of Living 

Sydney Theatre Company
by •
22 July 2024
Zoe de Plevitz as Jess and Dan Daw as John (photograph by Morgan Roberts)
‘The shit that happens is not to be understood,’ declares the character Eddie Torres in the first line of Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living. Eddie, played by a beautifully burly Philip Quast, inaugurates the play with this bald statement of life’s incomprehensibility. Some are born rich and safe; others into abuse and strife. ... (read more)

Tótem 

Hi Gloss Entertainment
by •
22 July 2024
Naíma Sentíes as Sol (photograph by Lila Avilés).
Children occupy a special place at the Berlinale, which rolls around every year in Brandenburg during frosty February. Unlike many other top-tier competition film festivals, Berlin provides a whole strand, Generation – divided into ‘Kplus’ and ‘14plus’ – devoted to films about the world of die kinder. Though crafted by adults, these works have a certain sympathy with the world view of those much younger. ... (read more)

Stereophonic 

Golden Theatre
by •
18 July 2024
The cast of Stereophonic (photograph by Julieta Cervantes)
There is a perennial fascination with the nature of creativity – what ignites it, what sustains it, and what, too often, destroys it. In this, creativity might be viewed as analogous to life itself, the consequence of a complex array of often unpredictable connections and influences, its ultimate viability always uncertain. That any individual cell of an idea develops into a fully fledged work of art, let alone one that survives across the centuries, is no less than miraculous. ... (read more)

A Streetcar Named Desire 

Melbourne Theatre Company
by •
16 July 2024
Nikki Shiels as Blanche DuBois (photograph by Pia Johnson)
Since its première in 1947, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire has become one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated plays. The demanding role of the tragic Southern belle Blanche Dubois has been played by some of the world’s great actresses, including Vivien Leigh, Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert, in Polish director Krysztof Warlikowski’s extraordinary reimagining at the 2012 Adelaide Festival. ... (read more)

Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson

National Gallery of Victoria
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15 July 2024
Ralph Balson, Painting 1954, oil on composition board, National Gallery of Victoria, The Joseph Brown Collection. Presented through the NGV Foundation by Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE, Honorary Life Benefactor, 2004 (courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria)

Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson may well get lost in the promotion of other exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria, but it is one not to be missed. Charting Crowley and Balson’s artistic journeys from the 1930s to the 1960s and their shared commitment to abstraction, it is an elegant, beautiful show that affords the rare opportunity to experience their work in depth.

... (read more)

Macbeth (an undoing) 

Malthouse Theatre
by •
11 July 2024
Bojana Novakovic as Lady Macbeth (photograph by Jeff Busby)
Feminist reimaginings of canonical male-authored texts are nothing new. In fact, following innumerable retellings of the Greek myths, the trend may have peaked last year with the publication of novels spotlighting the marginalised female characters of, among others, Nineteen Eighty-Four (both Katherine Bradley’s The Sisterhood and Sandra Newman’s Julia), Arthurian legend (Sophie Keetch’s Morgan Is My Name), and Romeo and Juliet (Natasha Solomons’s Fair Rosaline). ... (read more)

Gauguin’s World: Tōna Iho, Tōna Ao

by •
09 July 2024
Paul Gauguin, Parahi te marae (The sacred mountain), 1892, Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Mr and Mrs Rodolphe Meyer de Schauensee 1980 (courtesy of National Gallery of Australia)

These words put the case for and against Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) in a nutshell. Kihara speaks with the authority of a Pasifika, a transgender Japanese-Samoan artist who wittily restaged two dozen Gauguin paintings as colour photographs in her Paradise Camp series. Kihara dressed and posed Fa’afafine – men living and dressing in the manner of women – and her work cements the iconic status of Gauguin’s ‘wonderful’ imagery.

... (read more)
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