Theatre
It’s twilight in a small town in southern Idaho. There’s a housing crisis, widespread poverty, rampant drug addiction, and high levels of crime. Lost jobs, lost souls. Shuttered shops and hollow hearts. The sun is going down on the American dream and in the modest office of a Main Street mortgage broker there’s a man who thinks his problems will be solved by taking on more debt and still more debt. ... (read more)
There can be few superlatives left to describe Sarah Snook’s performance in Kip Williams’s London staging of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray – for the simple reason that she’s that good. Three days after I saw the play, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, Snook was awarded the Olivier Award for best actress. According to the Guardian’s Lanre Bakare’s summation of the awards on 14 April, she was, from an impressive list, the sole ‘marquee name’ to do so. ... (read more)
Recuperating after an almost lethal bout of tuberculosis contracted in his twenties, the Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) wrote that he had ‘discovered my method of working, my own brand of infamy, my particular form of brutality, my own idiosyncratic taste’. It was a method that from the start made him Austria’s literary hair shirt. ... (read more)
Gaslight
Rodney Rigby for Newtheatricals in association with Queensland Theatre
by Tim Byrne •
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 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 Patrick Flanery •
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 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)
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)
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)
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)