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Theatre

Gaslight 

Rodney Rigby for Newtheatricals in association with Queensland Theatre
by
12 March 2024
Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight (1938) surely ranks as the least likely cultural touchstone of our age. A middling melodrama about a suspicious husband, a nervy wife, and some dramatically expedient lost jewels, it made a minor splash on Broadway before being adapted twice for the screen, the second starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer in 1944 (Bergman won her first Oscar in the role). Decades passed and the work was largely forgotten, until the play’s title resurfaced as a byword for a particular category of coercive control. ... (read more)

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 

Bell Shakespeare
by
12 March 2024
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most tightly constructed plays. Productions that mess with the play’s structure risk creating a string of comic scenes that don’t hold together as a coherent whole. Thankfully, Peter Evans’s heavily cut and rearranged version for Bell Shakespeare doesn’t just avoid these pitfalls. It creates a play with a viewpoint and a clear storyline with its own sense of balance. ... (read more)

Qui a tué mon père (Who killed my father) 

Schaubühne Berlin and Théâtre de la Ville Paris
by
12 March 2024

For the past decade, French writer Édouard Louis has been excavating and recuperating a childhood spent in a state of acute precarity in the Hauts-de-France. He has written both critically and empathetically about the lives of his parents and siblings, while also casting a probing eye on himself. His first novel, the autofictional En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (The End of Eddy, trans. Michael Lucey, 2014), was published when he was only twenty-two and has enjoyed significant success in translation.

... (read more)

The Threepenny Opera 

Berliner Ensemble/ Adelaide Festival
by
08 March 2024
The enduring popularity of The Threepenny Opera is often attributed to Kurt Weil’s music rather than Bertolt Brecht’s text. As director Barrie Kosky notes with characteristic hyperbole in the Adelaide Festival program for his new production with the Berliner Ensemble: ‘Weil … is as important for the history of music theatre as Wagner.’ ... (read more)

Vanya 

National Theatre Live
by
08 March 2024
The dramatic energies of Uncle Vanya are basically centrifugal. As the play (first produced in 1899) rotates in its unwieldy way, the various characters – all of them dolorous creatures – are driven apart, pushed outward into the dreary wastes of private disappointment. Human relationships are of little consequence in this play; everyone is adrift in his or her own special incapacity. ... (read more)

The Inheritance 

fortyfivedownstairs
by
23 January 2024
We can look at the literary canon as our cultural inheritance: flawed and incomplete, maybe, but also a balm and a provocation stretching across the centuries. Part of its value lies in the connections we form between great works, the layers of meaning that build up over time like sediment in rock. American playwright Matthew López engages directly with this notion in his monumental seven-hour play The Inheritance, which is divided into two parts of comparable length. ... (read more)

Seventeen 

Melbourne Theatre Company
by
22 January 2024
In his program notes for the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Seventeen, playwright Matthew Whittet describes the play as ‘a conversation between generations. A conversation that acknowledges how hard it is to be on the brink of adulthood, but also how ridiculous and filled with utter joyful stupidity it is too.’ ... (read more)

The Seagull 

Sydney Theatre Company
by
27 November 2023

The setting is a country property somewhere in parched wheatbelt Australia. It is a four-hour drive from the city, with patchy phone reception. In Andrew Upton’s adaptation of Chekhov’s The Seagull, the character’s names remain the same, but we find Irina, Constantin, and Boris et al. in twenty-first-century Australia, dealing with mozzies and moaning about the internet, or lack thereof.

... (read more)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 

Red Stitch Actors' Theatre
by
20 November 2023

Since its sensational début on Broadway more than sixty years ago, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has become an enduring classic of the modern American canon. Its depiction of warring middle-aged couple Martha and George, and their drawing of young couple Honey and Nick into the gravitational field of the savage, alcohol-fuelled contretemps their marriage has become, remains a perennial favourite of the English-speaking theatre. Like moths, actors of a certain vintage are drawn to its bright flame, which shone never more brightly than in the superlative 1966 film adaptation directed by Mike Nichols, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the starring roles.

... (read more)

The Master & Margarita 

Belvoir St Theatre
by
20 November 2023

Don’t contradict strange gentlemen. Take special care around the George Street light rail. Watch out for flying pigs. Treat any black cat you might meet with caution, especially ones that speak to you. Woland and his satanic crew have taken up residence at Belvoir.

... (read more)