Many of the scholarly observations made about plays – who wrote them, when and why, their history, their canonical status, or not – are irrelevant. Audiences do not need to know such things.
Anyone who has seen a play can tell you whether it “works” or not – but very few people can tell you exactly why. We all need a better grasp of this. Why? So that playwriting can better represent contemporary Australia.
The devised performance text of Beauty and the Beast at the Adelaide Festival promises to highlight concerns related to disability and societal taboos – but falls short of a world-class standard.
Nothing to Lose invites the audience to engage with the richness, nuance, and variety of fat bodies.
Ally Garrett, by Toby Burrows
Nothing to Lose, by dance theatre company Force Majeure, invites the audience to engage with the richness, nuance, and variety of fat bodies and fat experiences.
Olwen Fuoéré performing riverrun, her stage adaptation of James Joyce’s last work, Finnegans Wake.
Colm Hogan, Adelaide Festival of Arts
Olwen Fuoéré’s extraordinary adaptation of Finnegans Wake for the stage brings a work with a reputation for obscurity back into the realm of popular culture.
Theatre critics are a vital point of mediation between the stage and the audience – and they must do their job with care and discernment. Tom E. Lewis onstage at the Malthouse in 2014.
AAP Image/Jeff Busby
Theatre reviewing should be a public judgement pronounced with discernment. So what are we to make of those who do it badly?
Nakkiah Lui asks why audiences are so willing to see Indigenous suffering onstage – but so unprepared to confront racism elsewhere in their lives.
Brett Boardman/ Belvoir St
Playwright Nakkiah Lui plays herself in Kill the Messenger, now on at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre. Hers is a strong, passionate and resilient Indigenous voice – and she has a message to deliver.
A national theatre would help showcase Australian drama past and present, such as A Long Way Home, a collaboration between the Sydney Theatre Company and the Australian Defence Force.
AAP Image/Sydney Theater Company/Lisa Tomasetti
Sociologist Max Weber once called politics “the slow boring of hard boards”. If he had been in the arts he might have added, “using your head as a drill”. Australia’s cultural agenda often feels like an…
Recognition is a super-human process that requires sacrifice …. and a bit of flying.
Atsushi Nishijima/Twentieth Century Fox
What do Shakespeare’s Hamlet, The Simpsons, and Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s film Birdman have in common? All three utilise the concept of meta-theatre. The concept of meta-theatre, or meta-text, in its crudest…
Hazem Shammas performs in the stage-adaptation of The Tribe in Sydney Festival.
Urban Theatre Projects
This week, as part of Sydney Festival’s Bankstown: Live program, Michael Mohammed Ahmad will present a stage-adaptation of his debut novel. The Tribe, published in 2014, tells the story of three generations…
In Wot? No Fish!! Braverman made the theatre into a kind of living room, offering the audience gefilte fish with chrein sauce.
Sydney Festival
During an artist talk just an hour before performing Wot? No Fish!! on Saturday at the Sydney Festival, English writer/actor Danny Braverman observed that as an artist he seeks “to foreground universals…
Is it ever okay to depict the assassination of living person?
KCNA/Reuters
Sony’s decision to cancel the Christmas Day release of its film The Interview is drawing harsh criticism from Hollywood’s elite. George Clooney is asking everyone to stand up against the cancellation…
Ridley Scott’s casting choices for Exodus: Gods and Kings are emblematic of a larger, systemic problem in the entertainment industry.
Movie Pilot
Director Ridley Scott recently set off a firestorm when he dismissed those who criticized him for casting white actors as every major character in the recently released Exodus: Gods and Kings, while reserving…
James Cromwell as an older Rupert Murdoch in David Williamson’s show Rupert.
AAP Image/Dean Lewins
The Melbourne Theatre Company’s (MTC) production of David Williamson’s 2013 play Rupert has finally made it to Sydney, via Melbourne and Washington, in late 2014. Along the way, the MTC has acquired the…
The recent discovery of a First Folio in St. Omer, France brings the total number of known copies to 233.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, National Art Library
The Shakespeare First Folio (1623), the first collected edition of his plays and the sole source for half of them (including Macbeth, Antony & Cleopatra, All’s Well, As You Like It, and The Tempest…
Gluck’s Iphigenie en Tauride is a milestone in opera history – and Pinchgut’s production is marvellous. Photo: Keith Saunders.
Pinchgut Opera
In any Opera History 101 course, Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787) is cited as one of the most influential figures in the development of opera. And, of course, this is true. Gluck’s operas, and his…