While London and Stratford-upon-Avon go into meltdown over the upcoming anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, a new production – shown recently in Western Australia – is worth looking at closely.
There is something a little anxiety-inducing about knowingly walking into a closed theatre in which we will have no choice but to listen to the over-60s talk about their sex lives.
Lear’s mordant images and sonorous cadences throb with dire warning and a sense of imminent catastrophe. So what’s the play’s key message, for current times, with Geoffrey Rush in the title role?
Hamlet is a play that haunts itself. Its saturation into cultural consciousness means that watching a performance is inevitably a process of past ghosts and past echoes framing the current performance.
Victorian Opera this week stages The Seven Deadly Sins, the final collaboration between Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. First staged in 1933, it is a masterpiece by two of the most revolutionary artists of Weimar Germany.
As a theatre director and supporter of the arts, Jules Wright was political, provocative and passionate. She was also overlooked in Australia’s obituaries when she died earlier this year. Why?
Orwell’s 1984 is a heavily laden text, which turned the author’s name into a byword for authoritarian nightmare. So what can we take from the 2015 stage version at the Melbourne Festival?
Tony Morrison’s Desdemona, which opens today in Melbourne, asks many questions of its audience. Perhaps most pressingly: what does it really mean to listen, rather than hear?
The new ‘science play’ Photograph 51 is hot on the heels of a host of others, including Stoppard’s The Hard Problem. Why are audiences attracted to these right now?
Berlin recently agreed to curb the number of migrants it welcomed after a backlash against Angela Merkel’s suspension of EU rules limiting numbers. It followed previous scenes of crowds welcoming new arrivals…
This year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival program features an array of performances by artists with disabilities. Their work tells its audience what the mainstream looks like from the margins.
Brett Bailey’s Macbeth at Brisbane Festival is a powerful production that relocates Verdi’s opera (based on Shakespeare’s play) to the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
An expanded program of interactive performances for children at this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival harnesses their audience’s innate creative abilities and invites them to both watch and join in.
This production of a very great play by the State Theatre Company of South Australia is beautiful, clarified, and haunting. You will be relieved to know it is “excellent”. More to the point it is right.
Cassamarca Foundation Chair in Latin Humanism and Chief Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions: Europe 1100-1800, The University of Western Australia