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
Since first being produced at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre in 2019, Suzie Miller’s play Prima Facie – a legal drama about consent and sexual violence – has become something of a phenomenon. Awarded Griffin Theatre’s playwriting prize in 2018, the subsequent production was enthusiastically received by audiences and critics alike. A 2022 West End production – propelled by the star power of Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer – garnered international acclaim, the National Theatre’s live screening of the production becoming one of 2022’s highest grossing British films. ... (read more)
The acoustics in the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall at the Melbourne Recital Centre are rightly celebrated. The hall offers shrewd and attentive musicians a rare kind of sonic ambience. We heard two further demonstrations of this last week, when the English pianist Paul Lewis returned to MRC with two more of his Schubert recitals (six sonatas in all) – superlative playing of the greatest finesse. Lewis, who never milks anything – not a phrase nor a post-concert talk – later referred to the Murdoch as one of his favourite concert halls in the world. ... (read more)
Given the success of the film adaptation of his previous play, The Father (2020), with an Academy Award-winning lead performance from Anthony Hopkins and a slew of nominations for himself, it seems only natural that writer–director Florian Zeller should turn to another in his trilogy of plays, The Son, for his next film project. (Zeller’s play, Le Fils, had its première in Paris in 2018.) Co-written by famed English playwright Christopher Hampton and shot by cinematographer Ben Smithard, who both worked on the earlier film, The Son represents, in many ways, a consolidation of Zeller’s talents, even if it doesn’t quite reach the harrowing intensity of The Father. ... (read more)
The Empress Elisabeth is trapped, cinched by the titular garment as tightly as she is stuck in her very public role and a loveless marriage. The audience, too, is held captive, mesmerised by the bold and dynamic performance of Vicky Krieps. ... (read more)
The degazetted former township of Wittenoom, 1,420 kilometres north-north-east of Perth, stands like a dark shadow on the lungs of Australian mining, less an isolated blight than a synecdoche for the exploitation and avarice of the industry as a whole. It was named by Lang Hancock himself, created in 1947 by his company Australian Blue Asbestos Pty Ltd, and was directly responsible for the death of more than 2,000 people. It is a potent and ghostly setting for Mary Anne Butler’s play of the same name. ... (read more)
Imagine … the Wonder of Picture Books
State Library of New South Wales
by Margaret Robson Kett •
03 February 2023
‘Just follow the ants,’ said a smiling guide at the Macquarie Street entrance to the State Library of New South Wales. I was led up the stairs by Tohby Riddle’s jaunty decals of those excellent insects to Imagine … the Wonder of Picture Books. ... (read more)
Although Peter Tyndall’s art is littered with the breezy, post-pop imagery of cartoons and illustrations, there is a sparse and unrelenting quality to his work. When assembled together, as in the current retrospective at Buxton Contemporary, they threaten to blur into one. Though this is by design, every painting and print here is a fragment of a single work that has been unwavering in its consistency over the past fifty years. ... (read more)
He may shock, horrify, polarise, and disgust but one thing Darren Aronofsky will never do is bore an audience. This is true of the director’s latest feature film, The Whale (2022), which has all the intensity of Black Swan (2010) and fascination of the controversial mother! (2017). Happy to say there’s no gore at all in this surprisingly sympathetic study of man who is morbidly obese, striving to right a wrong he committed in the past. ... (read more)
I worked front-of-house at the Melbourne Recital Centre for the better part of my twenties, sitting in on hundreds of classical music performances during that time. The highlight for me was a performance by the Australian Chamber Orchestra of Wojciech Kilar’s Orawa. I was to accompany a number of VIPs who would be seated onstage for the duration of the performance, just behind the orchestra, facing out – inverting the perspective I had grown so accustomed to. Now, with the musicians’ backs to me, and the audience in darkness, there was only one person for me to focus on: the conductor.
... (read more)
'The devil’s throat’, ‘the devil’s lair’, ‘the devil’s cauldron’: if volcanoes are the hearth of the devil, there is no question that Satan has an irresistible allure. To watch the earth split asunder and spew up its entrails in a roiling inferno is to encounter the elemental turbulence that festers underneath the stable ground we tread. It shakes all certainty to its core. It brings us face to face with all our cultural imaginings of the rage of apocalypse, and we cannot take our eyes off it. ... (read more)
