Equally welcome was the second opportunity to hear Massenet’s opera Thaïs (1894) within a matter of weeks. Once again it was a concert version – a ‘mid-season gala’ from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. ABR Arts wrote about Opera Australia’s recent concerts in the Sydney Town Hall ...

Florian Zeller’s play The Father (Le Père, 2012) comes to us after acclaimed productions in Paris, London, and New York, where the playwright was hailed as an exciting young talent, and one of France’s finest writers. He wrote the play for the French actor Robert Hirsch, who was ...

It’s springtime in Yorkshire, but you’d only know it by the lambs. The earth is stony and the wind is biting. Even the wildflowers struggle to bloom, let alone the romance that forms the central plot of God’s Own Country, an accomplished début feature from British writer–director Francis Lee ...

Cinema has always provided a venue for dreams of the exotic, but few directors in these post-colonial times can revive such fantasies without guilt. This is the dilemma which James Gray, among the most intelligent of modern American filmmakers, must grapple with in ...

The Rape of Lucretia is the most problematic of Benjamin Britten’s operas. Recent productions of Gloriana, the opera Britten wrote to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, have proved that its notoriously unsuccessful première in 1953 had more to do with an uncomprehending audience ...

In 1905 a Danish prince was elected to the throne of Norway. The King’s Choice begins with grainy archival footage of the arrival of the new royal family. The streets are lined with people. The cheering crowd scenes segue into a different kind of rally, and then Adolf Hitler’s familiar ...

In this fortnight's Update: Angels in America, Will Yeoman curates the 2018 Perth Writers' Festival, Towards Eternity, OzPod 2017, Thaïs in Melbourne, Public art in Southbank, Adelaide International Youth Film Festival, Under Your Spell, Celebrating Studio Ghibli, Babi Yar commemorative concert, and giveaways from fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and Transmission Films ...

There was a time not that long ago when the arts pages of quality daily newspapers were regarded as essential reading as much for those inside the arts industry as outside it. Just as these newspapers were themselves papers of record, their arts pages existed primarily to record and sustain ...

Kristin is a renowned art historian who has built a glittering career in the face of misogyny, developing an expertise that spans Renaissance frescoes and African tribal headdress. All the while she has remained true to the ideals of her activist youth: anti-establishment, anti-capitalist ...

It’s a provocative idea: disability as superpower. Can we imagine Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, as some sort mutant hero whose disfigurement is a gift? This is what the latest Malthouse production seems to be suggesting in its variation on the true story of a man with severe deformities ...