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Theatre

The Birds 

Malthouse Theatre
by
26 May 2025

Readers who encountered Daphne du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’ when it was first published in 1952 (as part of her short story collection The Apple Tree) would have heard in the story an echo of the German assault on Britain during World War II, images of rural England under attack from aggressive birds an apt metaphor for everything the country had recently endured. Yet what lifted the story from being merely an allegory of a past war to a tale that resonated – and continues to resonate – beyond its time is the cyclic nature of the birds’ incursions.

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Happy Days 

Sydney Theatre Company
by
14 May 2025

When I was a teenager in Melbourne in the 1980s, fretfully and privately imagining a grown-up life in which I was au courant with ‘culture’, I watched whatever arts programming the ABC threw at me. I have a very clear memory from that time of viewing a story about Anthill Theatre’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. I saw footage of Winnie, played by Julie Forsyth, buried up to her neck and speaking, what seemed to me at the time, a whole load of nonsense. 

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The Comeuppance 

Red Stitch
by
07 May 2025

The closest I have come to attending a high-school reunion was a wedding some years ago at which two of my former classmates were married. At the reception, I saw people I hadn’t thought about in years, including one who spent most of the night drunkenly demanding to know who remembered her from school (I did, vaguely, though this her behaviour made me wish I didn ...

The Lord of the Rings – A Musical Tale 

The Comedy Theatre
by
07 May 2025
A musical adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) sounds a lot like the set up for a Saturday Night Live comedy skit: tap dancing Orcs, perhaps; a plaintive song for Gollum to sing to the ‘precious’; chorus lines of hairy hobbit feet kicking in unison? Richard Wagner achieved the sublime with a grandiose tale of dwarves, dragons, and a magic golden band in his Der Ring des Nibelungen, so maybe it is possible. Sadly, after three seemingly interminable hours and a lot of questionable stagecraft, this version – too incompetent to be moving and not quite camp enough to be a hoot – is a slog worthy of a trip to Mordor. ... (read more)

The Glass Menagerie 

Ensemble Theatre
by
28 March 2025

Ensemble Theatre’s The Glass Menagerie offers a faithful but thrilling production of Tennessee Williams’s classic play. This iteration of Williams’s ‘memory play’ retains the historical and geographical settings in which the show was first performed (1944) and it does so with attentive fidelity to its language and cadence. The characters are placed firmly in the 1930s, in St Louis. They live in genteel poverty, trapped in myriad constraints – economic, social, and emotional. While Guernica burns, as the present-day narrator Tom Wingfield (Danny Ball) explains to the audience, he works dull days in a shoe warehouse to support his delusional mother and feeble sister.

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The Removalists 

Melbourne Theatre Company
by
17 March 2025
On the opening night of Melbourne Theatre Company’s new production of David Williamson’s The Removalists, director Anne-Louise Sarks invited onto the stage five of the actors who had performed in the play’s original 1971 production: Kristin Williamson, Fay Byrne, Paul Hampton, Bruce Spence (who also directed), and David Williamson, who played the eponymous removalist. (Peter Cummins, who played the lead character of Simmonds, died in late 2024.) ... (read more)

Henry 5 

Bell Shakespeare
by
06 March 2025

Is Henry V Shakespeare’s worst play? No, that unhappy honour goes to The Taming of the Shrew, an anti-comedy that grows more rancid with each passing year.

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Krapp’s Last Tape 

Adelaide Festival
by
04 March 2025
At a desk dimly lit by an overhead lamp sits a rumpled figure with a shock of black hair. He is dressed in white shirtsleeves, dark waistcoat, and slacks, and from beneath the desk peek a pair of grubby, off-white boots. He checks the time on a pocket watch. He yawns. Finally, he produces a set of keys and dangles them in front of his face until he locates the one he is looking for. ... (read more)

Truth 

Malthouse Theatre
by
20 February 2025
Silence is the central theme of Patricia Cornelius’s latest play, a theatrical documentary about the life and times of Julian Assange, focusing especially on his persecution following the publication of classified US military and diplomatic documents in 2010.  ... (read more)

Follies 

Victorian Opera
by
03 February 2025
A year after their production of Bernstein’s Candide, Victorian Opera has made another winning foray into the masterworks of American musical theatre with this finely wrought and brilliantly executed new staging of Follies at the Palais Theatre in St Kilda. ... (read more)