Arts
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Welcome to ABR Arts, home to some of Australia's best arts journalism. We review film, theatre, opera, music, television, art exhibitions – and more. To read ABR Arts articles in full, subscribe to ABR or take out an ABR Arts subscription. Both packages give full access to our arts reviews the moment they are published online and to our extensive arts archive.
Meanwhile, the ABR Arts e-newsletter, published every second Tuesday, will keep you up-to-date as to our recent arts reviews.
Recent reviews
There was a real sense of occasion on Thursday evening before the opening performance of Melbourne Opera’s new production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, first performed in 1835, with a libretto by Salvatore Cammarano, based on Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Bride of Lammermoor (1819). Bagpipes summoned us along Collins Street. Inside, the Athenaeum Theatre seemed close to full.
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Despite what it packs into barely an hour, Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (hereafter, Erde) is insufficiently long to fill a subscription concert. Hence, the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s brief first half, which featured two suitably complementary works. ... (read more)
Anyone who has lived in a sharehouse might recognise the hectic energy that defines Goran Stolevski’s third feature, Housekeeping for Beginners. Cinematographer Naum Doksevski’s handheld camera hovers so close to the actors that it seems almost to get beneath their skin; the film opens on a lounge room singalong, loud and unabashed, and barely lets up from there. ... (read more)
Shoot first, ask questions later. It’s a phrase that applies equally to the combat soldiers and the photojournalists at the heart of Civil War. From the opening scene to the provocative closing credits, Alex Garland’s new film follows a team of old-school correspondents who document a near-future dystopian United States at war with itself. They constantly insert themselves into the middle of skirmishes for the shot. A dogmatic devotion to capturing the moment is what drives both the plot and its characters. They are individuals with no backstory, married to the profession even as it destroys them psychologically. ... (read more)
Like each of the Iranian-British director Babak Jalali’s films to date, Fremont deals with the felt effects of geographical dislocation. Specifically, it follows the story of Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), an Afghan refugee and former translator for the US military. Settling in Fremont, California, she lives alone and works at a fortune cookie factory, trying to adapt to new surroundings while working through her difficult past. ... (read more)
Jeremy Herrin’s London production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night opens with a scene of such quiet intimacy it is tempting to think that the audience has been admitted early. Actors Brian Cox and Patricia Clarkson are as great a drawcard as the play itself. This is a perfect pairing for a work whose reputation as a masterpiece continues unabated. ... (read more)
While there is still no release date, Nicole Kidman’s production company Blossom Films announced several years ago that they were adapting Andrew Bovell’s play Things I Know to Be True (2016) into a drama series. Given that Bovell’s play Speaking in Tongues (1996) was adapted so successfully into the film Lantana (2001), this could prove the best place for the material. ... (read more)
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)
The game of tennis is simple: hit the ball over the net and make sure it lands between the straight white lines. It’s simpler than life, though tennis, like all other sports, is designed to act as its mirror – spectator sports are enticing because they lay bare the emotions that the complications of real life often obfuscate. Tennis is weaponised in this same way in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, a psychosexual sports drama that marries the mercuriality of love and lust with the capriciousness of a sport oft won by millimetres. ... (read more)
