Theatre

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.

Look out – here comes Cassandra. Her hair falls long and loose with a braid running through it: part classical heroine, part bohemian drifter. She could be a warrior maiden or the lead singer of an indie rock group. Fake-vintage band T-shirt, gold metallic miniskirt cut like the flaps of ancient armour, and the detail that unsettles the image: a large shopping bag she schleps from scene to scene.

What image does Romeo and Juliet conjure for you? How high is your balcony? In Shakespeare’s play, vertical distance is a nod to the Petrarchan courtly love conventions that placed the lady on a pedestal. But, like a lot of conventions, Shakespeare calls up this one only to implode it.

Publicity notes for The Orchard outline the questions that provoked Pony Cam’s loose adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904): ‘You’ve inherited a redundant cherry orchard, a crumbling climate, a failing economy and the final play written by Anton Chekhov. What will you salvage? Will you survive the adaptation?’ As far as this audience member is concerned, the answers to those questions are indisputable: ‘Nothing’ and ‘No’.

In the December 2024 issue of ABR, I reported that my cultural highlight for that year had been a screening of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1966 film, The Hawks and the Sparrows. Much of that film was narrated by a Marxist crow who explains ‘I come from far away, my country is called ideology, I live in the capital, the city of the future, on Karl Marx Street.’ Pasolini’s crow is weird, mordant, and scary. It will either eat you or school you in dialectic. The poet Ted Hughes also spent some of his 1960s thinking with corvids, publishing his poetry collection Crow in 1970. One of his poems has the crow realising that ‘God spoke Crow’, that the bird is the word, so to speak. These examples testify to the murky potency of the crow as an idea, as an animal that conveys sacrality, predation, and power. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers presents a different crow altogether, albeit one which acknowledges a debt to Hughes.

Sydney has had its coldest July in decades, and the rain it raineth every day, but this did not deter operagoers from savouring two further offerings in the winter season: a fine revival of what must rate as one of Opera Australia’s best Mozart offerings, and a new production of Antonín Dvořák’s melodious fairy tale.

We seem, bobbing in the slipstream of mega musicals like Les Misérables and Phantom of the Opera, to be living in the era of the chamber musical. Small scale, single-set productions with high concepts and minimal staging dominate the musical theatre landscape now, from Hamilton to Hadestown. Kimberly Akimbo, composed by Jeanine Tesori with book and lyrics by David Lindsay-Abaire, follows the general shape and emotional contours of Tesori’s previous chamber musical, an adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home. 

Among the plays of William Shakespeare, Coriolanus has garnered more respect than love. William Hazlitt, writing in 1816, in the wake of the French Revolution, thought that the play could spare its audience the trouble of reading Edmund Burke or Thomas Paine. The play’s depiction of class division fascinated Bertolt Brecht, who worked on his own adaptation, seeing in the play’s protagonist a figure consistent with the alienation effects of his own theatre. But if such recommendations inspire fears of a drama more didactic than entertaining, they can be dismissed: Bell Shakespeare’s production embraces its audience, ‘patrician’ and ‘plebeian’ alike. 

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.