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.
Paul Dalgarno, The Conversation dan Madeleine De Gabriele, The Conversation
It’s another year in Arts + Culture, so in case you missed it we’ve collected all the best coverage of screen, theatre, music, books and culture in one place.
King Lear manifests the neurosis of age and abuse. While his behaviour is dramatically exaggerated, we can read universal lessons on toxic family dynamics in Shakespear’s tragedy.
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.
Jurassica, the latest play from Red Stitch, is a cross-generational reflection on the migrant experience. It’s part of a long tradition of plays exploring the challenges faced by Italian-Australians.
The Experiment – showing at the Melbourne Festival – is just that: an experiment. It aims to create a meditation in which disquieting questions can menacingly float. Does it succeed? Well …
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?
The Melbourne Festival production of Desdemona, written by Toni Morrison and with music by Malian songstress Rokia Traore, puts the women of Shakespeare’s Othello centre stage.
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?
From Afar on a Hill is an immersive theatre work that provides insight into the lived experience of asylum seekers and lays bare the arbitrariness of Australia’s immigration policies.
Many still regard George Orwell’s 1984 and its message about the nature of language and power “definitive”. But globalisation has revolutionised how we communicate; 1984 tells us nothing about our future.
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.