In 1881, armed with the confidence of youth, the twenty-one-year-old Anton Pavlovich Chekhov fronted up to the Maly Theatre in Moscow, at that time one of the foremost theatres in the world, in order to present its leading actress, Maria Yermolova, with a copy of his recently written and probably first play. The great lady promptly returned the manuscript, whi ...

Hamlet belongs to the final years of Elizabeth’s reign, when the system of espionage the old queen had created through her spymaster-general, Francis Walsingham – the network of ‘watchers’, as Stephen Alford calls them in a recent brilliant study of this phenomenon – had become ...

When Red Stitch premièred Tom Holloway’s Red Sky Morning a few years ago, it was clear that Australian theatre was witnessing the birth of a significant dramatic voice. Here were a series of interlinked monologues rich in poetic intensity, mixing Aussie vernacular with a haunting lyricism that sung of the earth and was roo ...

As our government prepares to increase our involvement in a Middle Eastern disaster we should never have taken part in, Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children seems more pertinent than ever.

The theatre of Bertolt Brecht has always pr ...

In Saul Bass’s title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest, diagonal and vertical lines intersect to form a grid that eventually dissolves to the façade of a New York City office building. Bringing the classic spy caper to the stage for the first time, Melbourne Theatre Company uses that visu ...

Australian plays good or simply fortunate enough to make it from page to stage have historically tended to meet one of two fates: canonisation or, much more likely, limited production when still new and utter neglect thereafter. Independent Melbourne theatre company Don’t Look Away, established in 2013 under the artistic direction of Phil Rouse, specialises in exh ...

Black Diggers (), written by Tom Wright, directed by Wesley Enoch, and produced by the Queensland Theatre Company, received its world première at the 2014 Sydney Festival in January. Then, the full clamour of Australia’s more than $400 m ...

It is ironic that Annie Baker’s 2014 Pulitzer-Prize winning play about one of the last American cinemas to use a 35-millimeter projector is being revived by Red Stitch, whose theatre is opposite The Astor, the classic Melbourne cinema that was recently sold and will soon be transformed into a twenty-first century digital ‘palace’.

Red Stitch first perf ...

The fact that two of Australia’s major theatre companies are performing Endgame concurrently is, one hopes, merely a coincidence and not a reflection on the national Zeitgeist, for the play is one of the bleakest works in Samuel Beckett’s not exactly sunny canon. If Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot cling desperately to some hope, their co ...

Endgame. The title evokes that moment in chess when few pieces are left on the board, when the end is nigh but neither player can be confident of victory; the sense of an ending looms, but any hope of catharsis or resolution feels indulgent and premature – futile even. When the first w ...