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.
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Articles on Theatre
Displaying 281 - 300 of 372 articles
Regardless of reasoning and the plethora of scholarship that exists, Greek tragedy remains the most modern form of drama. It is unafraid to question everything we value.
Seventeen is the story of teenagers on the brink of adulthood; its canny trick is a cast of actors in their 70s. Despite this, it’s a conservative play that adheres to a predictably happy ending.
‘Theatre directors come in two kinds: “star” and “of use”. I’m in the latter category, which means that, for any given play, there are at least three or four other directors who could do it equally well.’
New stories can offer insight on alternative ways of living out our lives. As the experience in Cambodia shows, the performing arts can help us face up to enormous challenges and possibilities.
A gang-rape scene in a new London staging of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell was greeted with audience booing, and has sparked ongoing controversy. Are opera directors at risk of miscomprehending the medium?
In cultural policy every good idea becomes a bad one if the context is confused. The fact there wasn’t initial clarity around the Program for Excellence indicates it will probably do more harm than good.
The cast have made a personal and emotional sacrifice in entering into the nightmare world of Jimmy Savile. And for that, they deserve our respect and praise.
Covering love, loss and IVF, Kylie Trounson’s latest play explores the life of her own father, pioneering biologist Alan Trounson, and the invention of IVF.
Sport for Jove’s The Merchant of Venice is a production of ourstanding clarity, making it ideal for students or perhaps even those who simply don’t often see Shakespeare in the theatre.
Drama involves an altered representation of reality – and the way we understand both the representations and the reality evolve. Duncan Graham’s recent play Cut shows how significantly those understandings change.
Centuries before the internet, Shakespeare became a global phenomenon.
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.
Bowie and the Bible have long been tied together in the work of director Ivo van Hove.
Is it too soon for this dark episode to be recreated on stage? Not if it is handled properly.
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.
If you’d taken a trip to the theatre in 1815 Paris, chances are that the stage would be political.
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, 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’s extraordinary adaptation of Finnegans Wake for the stage brings a work with a reputation for obscurity back into the realm of popular culture.
Top contributors
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Professor of Creative Arts, Griffith University
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Researcher, The Australian Centre, The University of Melbourne
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Adjunct Associate Professor, Auckland University of Technology
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Lecturer in English, Australian National University
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Associate Professor of English Literature, University of Sydney
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Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies, UNSW Sydney
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Senior Lecturer, English and Theatre Studies, The University of Melbourne
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Professor of Drama and Theatre Studies, Royal Holloway University of London
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Canada Research Chair in Socially Engaged Theatre; Director, Centre for Socially Engaged Theatre (C-SET), University of Regina
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Research assistant, Empire, Migration and Belonging, University of Oxford
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Sessional lecturer and researcher, The University of Melbourne
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Lecturer in Theatre, The University of Melbourne
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Hon Research Fellow in Poetry and Theatre studies, The University of Western Australia
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Senior Lecturer – Modern History, Macquarie University
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Lecturer in Musical Theatre, Griffith University
