Could Macbeth be Shakespeare’s most innately cinematic play? Even in its brief stage directions and off-stage action, it conjures up daring battlefields, horrible massacres, spine-tingling witchcraft, wandering spirits, duels on castle ramparts, and a moveable forest. Every few years another filmmaker tries their hand at it, Orson Welles (Macbeth, 1948), Akira Kurosawa (Throne of Blood, 1957), and Roman Polanski (Macbeth, 1971) notable among them. 2006 gave us Geoffrey Wright’s best-forgotten Dunsinane-does-Underbelly version, while Justin Kurzel (director of Snowtown and the recent Nitram) injected his terrific 2015 version with rousing battle sequences and a blockbuster-ready, musclebound Thane of Glamis. Now, not long after Kurzel’s film, comes The Tragedy of Macbeth from Joel Coen, working without his brother Ethan for the first time in decades. Where Kurzel’s version aimed for historical realism and cinematic virtuosity, Coen’s adaptation is faithful above all else to Macbeth’s original medium: the theatre.

Eleven vials of smallpox virus were transported to Sydney on the First Fleet by Surgeon John White¹. In the crucible of a filmmaker’s mind, this historical fact is forged into fantasy, the vials transmuted into eleven vampires, let loose to suck the lifeblood out of the local people. When that filmmaker is Warwick Thornton (Sweet Country, Samson and Delilah), this monstrous cargo becomes a metaphor to explore the atrocities of colonialism and their emotional sequelae, all wrapped in the idiom of genre. This is Firebite, an Aboriginal vampire thriller television series, co-created by Thornton and Brendan Fletcher (Mad Bastards) and co-directed by Thornton, Fletcher, and Tony Krawitz (The Tall Man).

Steven Spielberg obviously relishes challenges. Tackling, at this late stage in his career, his first musical is challenge enough, but directing a remake of one of the most iconic filmed musicals since the talkies arrived might be considered a mixture of chutzpah and lunacy. Luckily, the result is, mostly, a successful mixture of hommage and re-evaluation.

In his program notes, Kip Williams, artistic director of Sydney Theatre Company, talks about the need to ‘wrestle’ Arthur Miller’s great play ‘into the present’. But if ever there was a play that speaks, as the Quakers would say, directly to us in our condition, it is this one. When Miller wrote it, he assumed that the postwar boom would not last and that America would head back into another depression. In fact, the boom continued, and for the next thirty years the United States, albeit hesitantly, moved past the horrors of McCarthyism, Vietnam, and the brutal resistance of the south to the Civil Rights Act towards a more just and equitable society. But the election of Ronald Reagan and the last forty years of triumphant, unrestrained capitalism have led us to the Trumpian world where people are either winners or losers and are, in the gig economy, to paraphrase Willy Loman, eaten like an orange and thrown away like the peel. Miller’s play is a reminder that being human, in his words, ‘is something most of us fail at most of the time and a little mercy is eminently in order given the societies we live in’.

Say the words ‘Australian opera singer’ and most people, if any names were to surface at all, would nominate Nellie Melba or Joan Sutherland. But for a country with a small population, Australia, since Melba’s début in 1887 at the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, has consistently punched above its weight in the production of successful classical singers. In the 1950s and 1960s, both Covent Garden and London’s alternative opera company, Sadler’s Wells, were studded with Australian singers, while in Paris, Menindee-born Lance Ingram, under the name Albert Lance, was for many years a leading tenor at the Paris Opera, partnering Maria Callas, among many others. Today singers such as Stuart Skelton and Nicole Car have major careers only slightly curtailed (one hopes) by the wretched virus.

The opening weekend of The View from Here at the refurbished Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) happened to coincide with the Perth International Jazz Festival. The city was abuzz with crowds enjoying long delayed sunny skies and free open-air jazz concerts. Scaffolding had disappeared from AGWA’s façade just in time.

For decades, Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel Dune (1965) was generally regarded as unfilmable, a literary work that defied transposition into another artistic medium. Never one to balk at a challenge, David Lynch embarked on his own adaptation of Dune in 1984. With neither the majesty of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) nor the commercial appeal of the Star Wars franchise, Lynch’s version largely faded into obscurity, though it has since become something of a cult film. Before Lynch, experimental Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky had, according to Frank Pavich’s documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), planned a ten- to fourteen-hour production, starring Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, and Mick Jagger, among others. That project was, unsurprisingly, abandoned; we are left to ruminate on what might have been.

In Cantonese theatre, bamboo structures have been used for more than a century. Cathedrals of bamboo, shocking in their scale and intricacy, shelter spaces in which art, culture, and religion flourish. These theatres are temporary, existing often for less than two months before they are taken apart and removed. They require no nails; instead, they are bound by bits of black twine and stand upright as if by magic. It’s a dangerous practice. While bamboo scaffolding remains ubiquitous in Hong Kong, it’s been mostly banned in China due to safety concerns.

It was never going to be a normal Melbourne International Jazz Festival. After all, there was nothing normal about the past two years. Having been forced to cancel in 2020, the festival made the decision to shift the 2021 event from its usual June timeslot to mid-October, perhaps hoping the extra few months might make a difference. The program was duly issued, tickets both offered and sold. Clearly, there would be nothing international about it, though it featured a strong interstate contingent. But in the end, lockdowns ensued, and October came and went. That might well have been the end of it. But, with tenacious resolve, MIJF re-grouped and scheduled a heavily stripped-down program for early December, this time playing it safe by sticking nearly exclusively to local musicians. There were few complaints. Advance bookings were strong in a city long deprived of live music, with some performances selling out within hours of the program’s launch.

This exhibition, alive with colour, is a gift to our grey summer. The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) was already crowded at 10.30am on the first Sunday; our umbrellas were bagged, our raincoats cloaked. Matisse: Life and spirit, drawn mainly from the exceptional holdings of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, is the first dedicated Matisse exhibition in Australia for twenty-six years. The Gallery carefully says this is the ‘largest collection of work by Matisse to be seen in Sydney’, but that understates the appeal of this lovely exhibition. It offers an incisive, intelligent, and thorough introduction to Matisse that is essential viewing; its generosity and subtlety will repay multiple visits. (I wish I were a kid again, could see Matisse for the first time.)