culture
theatre
theatre March 9, 2019
Ellen Burstyn, in Melbourne to star onstage in 33 Variations, has a film career spanning six decades and including such cinematic touchstones as The Exorcist and The Last Picture Show. She talks tabout Beethoven, spirituality and recruiting Scorsese to direct her in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. “I asked that he be the director. He had already made Mean Streets, but it hadn’t been released and he was deeply grateful that I wanted him. This doesn’t mean that I gave him his start. And there was no stopping him, anyway – he would have got there in any case. But, you know, there was never any sense with Marty of working with a monster, with a master in the nasty sense. He’s marvellous, he’s an original. He’s smart and fiery and rough and excitable and alive.”
theatre March 2, 2019
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child succeeds in furthering J. K. Rowling’s remarkable canon, with a greater dramatic thrust than the films but all the heart of the books that seduced young and old alike.
theatre February 9, 2019
The National Theatre’s modern, militarised take on Antony and Cleopatra – ‘the greatest of Shakespeare’s history plays’ – offers a flat production but fine performances from Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo.
theatre February 16, 2019
Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Mary Stuart shares with the recent film starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie a desire to portray rival monarchs Mary and Elizabeth I as sisters pitted against each other by the patriarchy.
opera February 2, 2019
Where’s home for theatre and opera director Barrie Kosky?
Barrie Kosky’s peripatetic career has led him to work throughout Australia and Europe, before finally establishing a true connection with Berlin. Still, for the Melbourne-born theatre and opera director, nothing says “home” like a rehearsal room. “It just happened that theatre discovered me, and performance and music discovered me, because the very same time that I started to think, ‘Who am I? How does this relate to me?’ and felt that disconnectedness, was the very same time I was experiencing music: Mahler symphonies or puppet shows or musicals or opera. And it was very linked.”
theatre March 10, 2018
‘Beautiful: The Carole King Musical’ and ‘The Show Goes On’
While the cast of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical fails to deliver an uplifting experience, Bernadette Robinson, in her solo performance of The Show Goes On, is transcendent as she channels the great women of song.
theatre December 23, 2017
Theatre director Elizabeth LeCompte
As Elizabeth LeCompte’s theatrical take on a controversial 1971 debate about women’s liberation heads to the Sydney Festival, the director talks about art and feminism, then and now. “We thought [The Town Hall Affair] was too urbane and distant for most people to be interested in,” she says plainly, but “things just broke around it”.
theatre December 1, 2017
John Bell delivers perhaps his finest performance as a man suffering dementia in Florian Zeller’s masterpiece The Father.
theatre October 21, 2017
Billie Piper’s performance in Lorca’s tragedy Yerma caps a powerful production at the Young Vic for the ‘antipodean Orson Welles’, Simon Stone.
television October 21, 2017
Actress Pamela Rabe on tackling Ibsen
Following the success of her Glass Menagerie with Eamon Flack, Pamela Rabe reunites with the director to explore the knottiness of Ibsen’s Ghosts. “I’m never one to sit around and wait for the phones to ring,” she says. “I love working in the theatre, and I work a lot in the theatre.”
theatre September 15, 2017
Gary Abrahams’ production of Angels in America is stark and shrewd, and has in Helen Morse a virtuosic display of restrained acting.
