Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced explores the contemporary conflict between Islam and the West by exposing the fear and loathing lurking beneath personal relationships.
Both Hamlet and ‘True Detective’‘s Rust Cohle make audiences wonder whether they’re deserving of sympathy or blame.
Nick Lehr/The Conversation
The psychological complexity of Shakespeare’s characters has rendered them timeless. Today, we see The Bard’s influence in shows like ‘Breaking Bad’ and ‘True Detective.’
Posters advertise the dramatization of Sinclair Lewis’ ‘It Can’t Happen Here.’
Wikimedia Commons
Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel ‘It Can’t Happen Here,’ which described the rise of an American dictator, was turned into a play seen by over 500,000 people.
Another copy of William Shakespeare’s First Folio has been found in a manor in Scotland.
Dylan Martinez/Reuters
A copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio of plays has been found in Scotland. While this is good news, a staggering 744 plays from Shakespearian London - at least two of them written by the Bard - remain lost.
Whose story are you telling? Neil Armfield’s The Secret River is a chronicle of colonialism.
The Sydney Theatre Company/Heidrun Löhr
The stage version of The Secret River gives us a deeper sense of our history. But can understanding the past from different perspectives help us confront the inequalities that linger in our present?
A tasty morsel: Victorian Opera’s Banquet of Secrets
Jeff Busby
Musical theatre is on the rise in Australia. Still, if more subsidised companies invested in new works, we might yet see the Great Australian Musical.
The wives win hands-down in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
REUTERS/Toby Melville. An image of playwright William Shakespeare from The Herball, a 16th-century book on plants.
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.
It’s time to look back on a year of art and culture.
Blake Danger Bentley. Melbourne street art
Paul Dalgarno, The Conversation e 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.
Geoffrey Rush as King Lear … the last guy you want at the festive barbie.
James Green
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.
James Green
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?
We cannot help but remember Hamlet: it is iconic.
Robin Goldsworthy, Ivan Donato, Philip Dodd, Josh McConville. Photo: Daniel Boud
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.
Dance is about creating work in a collaborative way.
Joseph Mehling
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.
Vumani Oedipus being staged at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg.
Wits Theatre
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 …
Jules Wright was political, provocative and passionate.
Stephen Morgan
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?