Tim Byrne
Straight Acting by Will Tosh & The Hollow Crown by Eliot A. Cohen
To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.
... (read more)Did I Ever Tell You This? by Sam Neill & Everything and Nothing by Heather Mitchell
To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.
... (read more)In Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), a handful of people enter a stage during a rehearsal and begin to break down the very structures of theatre itself. They question not just the verisimilitude of acting but the essentialism of character, the idea that we are ever any one thing fixed in time. It is a concept that animates Virginia Gay’s free adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac (1897): this is a tragic hero who pushes at the confines of their assigned role, daring to imagine not just an alternate ending but an entirely new way of being Cyrano.
... (read more)One thing is certain: Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors is flat out hilarious, and if it isn’t funny enough on stage, it’s the fault of the production. His only farce, it is often thought to be an early work, but it is surely far too assured to be written before 1594. It’s entirely free of the striving Marlovian rhetoric that hampers the Henry VI plays (commenced in 1591), and it is cleaner, cleverer, and more convincing than The Taming of the Shrew (probably before 1592). It is based on Plautus’s Menaechmi ...
... (read more)It opens outside the tiny wooden box that is Red Stitch’s St Kilda home; the actors come towards us with torches blazing, in medieval masks. What follows is a brief pageant, a morality play that breaks down when one of the players falls victim to a mysterious pestilence – although it’s clear from the catch in the other actors’ voices that this contagion is not entirely unexpected. The actor drops, and his sister must be wrenched from his fallen body before she too succumbs. The plague is about, and all anyone can do is run.
... (read more)