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Arts

Film  |  Theatre  |  Art  |  Opera  |  Music  |  Television  |  Festivals

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

Letter from London

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January-February 2023, no. 450
Letter from London by Ian Dickson

After its recent political and financial traumas, your correspondent arrived in London expecting to find a sombre, subdued city. Far from it. The Christmas lights were blazing in the West End, and on the weekends it was almost impossible to move while battling the hordes. But it was noticeable that few people were actually carrying shopping bags, and though the stores were crammed, the actual lines at the counters were remarkably short. The high-end restaurants were packed with pre-Christmas parties; after all, in London the rich you will always have with you. It may be my imagination, but the gaiety seemed slightly hysterical, as though this were a version of the duchess of Richmond’s ball – a last frolic before the onslaught. 

... (read more)

Mandy Martin – A Persistent Vision

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20 December 2022
Mandy Martin, Unknown Industrial Prisoner, 1977 (photograph by Andrew Curtis)
Before environmental psychologist Glenn Albrecht gave us the language of solastalgia, Mandy Martin painted Depaysement (2003). Martin chose a different word that also explores a sort of longing for a home that was no longer there, a safe place that predated the environmental destruction that rendered home unrecognisable. ... (read more)

Data Relations

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
by •
20 December 2022
Zach Blas, Metric Mysticism: A Troll’s Tale, 2022 (photograph by Andrew Curtis)
Is there now an elemental quality to data? Amazon and Meta have certainly demonstrated that data can be harnessed like a natural resource. Yet given that we, the users, shed data at an uncontrollable and unknowable rate, perhaps Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are not twenty-first century oil barons so much as the managers of a silkworm farm? Is all this data just simply information? Do we even have a right to claim it back? ... (read more)

Triangle of Sadness 

Sharmill Films
by •
19 December 2022
Charlbi Dean in Triangle of Sadness (photograph by Fredrik Wenzel)
People’s taste in satire can be as acquired and specific as their taste in art overall; some favour scalpel-like precision (the television of Armando Iannucci), while others prefer more of a sledgehammer approach (the films of Adam McKay). Your appreciation for Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness will vary depending on your tolerance for sweeping observational class satire (and the on-screen depiction of bodily fluids) ... (read more)

The Banshees of Inisherin 

Searchlight Pictures
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19 December 2022
Colin Farrell in The Banshees of Inisherin (photograph by Jonathan Hession)
When did nice become an insult, and simple such a burden? Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell) is a nice man, leading a simple life on the fictional island of Inisherin, just off the coast of Ireland. The year is 1923. Even as a civil war rages across the water, for Pádraic all is well in the world so long as he gets to meet his lifelong friend, Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson), at the pub at 2 pm every day for a pint. ... (read more)

Australian Youth Orchestra 

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19 December 2022
Andrew Ford (photograph by Jim Rolon)

After a welcome return to something approaching a pre-Covid normal season of training camps and concerts, the Australian Youth Orchestra has finished the year with a grand public concert at the Melbourne Town Hall.

... (read more)

A Christmas Carol 

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16 December 2022
Samuel Dundas as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (photograph by Charlie Kinross)
1843 was quite the year in Christmas lore. It can boast both the first Christmas cards, commissioned by Sir Henry Cole, and the first edition of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Our passion for the former may have ebbed a little in the age of digital communication, but Dickens’s novella – albeit most commonly in one of its many theatrical adaptations – continues to draw our interest. Melbourne is currently hosting the Old Vic production of Jack Thorne’s adaptation at the Comedy Theatre (with David Wenham as Scrooge). Now it also has an opera première: composer Graeme Koehne and librettist Anna Goldsworthy’s version for Victorian Opera. ... (read more)

Retainers of Anarchy

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06 December 2022
Howie Tsui 'Retainers of anarchy' 2017 (video still), Art Gallery of New South Wales
Outlaw, the opening exhibition of the purpose-built new media gallery at Sydney Modern, (the Art Gallery of New South Wales’s new extension) features Howie Tsui’s mesmerising multimedia installation, Retainers of Anarchy. On a 27.4-metre long, 3.85-metre high projection, which simulates the form of a scroll painting, hundreds of images hand-drawn in ink are animated into a kaleidoscope of supernatural severed heads, grotesque tortures, and characters familiar from wuxia (martial arts) novels and television series. These fantastical images jostle with motifs of everyday life in Hong Kong and iconic figures from the pro-democracy protests that culminated in the Umbrella Movement of 2014 and were later to erupt in the all-out rebellion in 2019 and its violent suppression by Xi Jinping’s government. ... (read more)

The Tempest 

Sydney Theatre Company
by •
05 December 2022
Richard Roxburgh as Prospero (photograph by Daniel Boud)
The Sydney Theatre Company’s staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, directed by Kip Williams, is centred around a large rock set on a revolving mechanism that assists with scene changes and helps to animate this rather static play about characters shipwrecked on a tropical island. The rock is reminiscent of the story of Prometheus, chained forever to a large rock by Zeus, but this is the ‘hard rock’ to which Caliban (the only character native to the island) is banished by the lordly Prospero, which reminds us that the island (and perhaps even the play) is Caliban’s domain. ... (read more)

Monsters 

Malthouse Theatre
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02 December 2022
Josie Weise, Alison Whyte, Samantha Hines in Monsters (photograph by Pia Johnson)
Is there any trope more ubiquitous to the horror genre than the jump scare? A sudden scream cuts through a loaded silence; a flitting shadow hosts a monstrous threat. It’s a trope often traced back to 1945’s Cat People. In the film, a scare comes in the form of an errant bus. Known as the ‘Lewton Bus’ after producer Val Lewton, the term is now a kind of genre shorthand, referring to a sequence that gleefully teases its audience with the possibility of an approaching shock. A character, face barely lit, walks down a dark street flinching at shadows. The sound of their rushed footsteps increase in volume and pace before the roar of a bus breaks the tension. Suspense results from the harmony between lighting, mise en scène and sound. We never see our monster, nor do we need to. A bus is scary enough. ... (read more)
Page 28 of 118
Monash Univeristy - July
Peter Rose Editorial Cadetship
Grief is the thing with feathers