Theatre
One might be pardoned for assuming, from the preponderance of mono-dramas at this year’s Adelaide Festival, that some mix of budgetary pressures and theatrical taste has meant that drama even the minimal Greek combination of three theatrical presences is not high on the director’s shopping list. Elsewhere, as in Perth during its recent ...
In May 1957, with some trepidation, Tennessee Williams went into analysis under the care of the fashionable psychiatrist Lawrence Kubie, known to his distinguished clientèle as Dr Sugar. Kubie insisted that Williams should temporarily separate from his partner of the time, Frank Merlo, and give up drink and writing. With a sense of relief, Williams banished the tem ...
Jumpy, by British playwright April De Angelis and directed by Pamela Rabe, opens Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2015 season. First produced at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 2011, it is a modern-day comedy of manners whose plot and subject matter owe much to the television sitcom. Its humour relies on bedroom intrigues, blunt sexual dialogue, marital ...
Pennsylvania Avenue is billed by the Melbourne Theatre Company as a world première, with the expectation that singer Bernadette Robinson’s new one-woman show will travel the world, like her previous one, Songs for Nobodies (MTC, 2010). In that show, Robinson inhabited several ‘nobodies’ and the famous singers they encounter. When, in November 2012, I interviewed Robinson in the run-up to the final Melbourne season, she let me in on a secret. She had plans for a new production that would showcase divas who have appeared at Carnegie Hall.
... (read more)It is a romance of simplicity and much tenderness. There are two people, and they are in love. Their love is tested, but hope triumphs in the end.
Anne (Helen Morse) is in her sixties, a grandmother, still doing piece work to support herself while babysitting for her daughter. She begins a relationship with Majid (Yomal Rajasinghe), a much younger man of a d ...
Stephen Sondheim may be famed for his wit, but many critics over the years have lacerated him for it, finding in it proof of emotional frigidity or even callousness. Reaction to his work largely mirrors that of another revered auteur, Stanley Kubrick, who shares with Sondheim an exacting and interrogative attitude to humanity.
Adapted and directed by Peter Brook in conjunction with Hélène Estienne and Franck Krawczyk, The Suit was first staged in a French-language version (Le Costume) in 1999. In English, fifteen years on, and with significant changes having been made (including the replacement of recorded music with a live trio), The Suit remains vitally alive, showing none of the signs of the lethal malaise Brook described in his seminal book of theatre theory, The Empty Space (1968), as the Deadly Theatre.
... (read more)A play in which two characters metaphorise the complex relationship between China and Australia does not sound very promising. We have seen this sort of thing before, not always happily – in the blue corner a lovably cantankerous professor representing ‘science’, in the red corner a cheery troglodyte who is ‘faith’ incarnate, and so on and on into the wors ...
As I sat through the standing ovation that greeted the performance of the Nick Enright/Max Lambert musical Miracle City that I attended, I wondered why it is that some productions seem to get a free ride. Few regular theatre-goers would disagree with the contention that we are at present in Australia living through a golden age of acting talent. The huge boos ...
Four white students and a gun wait in a room overlooking the street through which the prime minister will pass. Kill the PM, liberally adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872) by Fregmonto Stokes, and directed by James Dalton for Unhappen, is terse and arresting theatre.
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