‘Literary couples are a plague,’ wrote Elsa Morante, married to Alberto Moravia. They’re one of the couples in this lively exploration of what happens when two writers share loves and lives.
Major plot points explode like hand grenades in Adrianne Howell’s Hydra, which is ‘never dull’, but implausible. And Alice Nelson’s Faithless, about love and literature, operates in a rarefied world.
President John F Kennedy Meets with the President of the Republic of Ghana Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah
Wikimedia Commons
Compared to other politicians who tend to be indirect and evasive, Nkrumah was direct, explicit and assertive.
Marianne Ihlen: she remains stuck in the role of the beautiful ingénue, the part-time lover, in Nick Broomfield’s documentary.
Copyright Nick Broomfield
Nick Broomfield’s latest documentary explores the romance between Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen. But the film fails to confront the harder truths of the license taken by, and conceded to, creative men.
Anna McGahan as Charmian Clift in Sue Smith’s play Hydra. Long overshadowed by her husband George Johnston, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Clift’s life and work.
Jeff Busby/Queensland Theatre
Fifty years after her death, Australian writer Charmian Clift is experiencing a renaissance. With her forward-thinking columns, Clift’s voice rose above the crowd during post-war Australia.
Sue Smith’s play recreates wild years spent on the island of Hydra, which became an artist’s refuge.
Jeff Busby
A new play tells the story of George Johnston and Charmian Clift’s time on the Greek island of Hydra, which ultimately led to the novel My Brother Jack - but not without sacrifices.
Hydra 1960, including Leonard Cohen (bearded, left) and Redmond Wallis (centre right in cotton shirt).
Photographer unknown. Reproduced with the permission of Dorothy Wallis.
Leonard Cohen’s final (posthumous) book was released in Australia this week. Another new book sheds light on Cohen’s life on Hydra in the 1960s and the relationships he forged with Antipodeans seeking liberation there.
In the comic series Watchmen, physicist Jon Osterman is blown apart in a science experiment gone awry. But his “consciousness” is able to pull his body back together atom by atom, becoming the radiating…