This is the enterprising Dinner With A View’s second season. I was lukewarm about the first, which involved a number of short plays of varying quality. This time around, the selection is an interesting one: Witold Gombrowicz’s Princess Ivona.
READ MOREAugust, 2010
Melbourne (Play)readings Festival
Over the next several weeks, a number of Melbourne theatres are hosting playreadings as part of one or another script development program. Maybe it’s Writers Festival contagion, or just a deep breath before the city plunges itself into the event chaos that is the International Arts Festival/Fringe Festival duplex, but either way, I think early [...]
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REVIEW: Burnt By The Sun | New Theatre, Sydney
There are those, perhaps many in number, who surmise critics to be nasty, undersexed, smallminded, sanctimonious frustrated people who sit in the dark, slathering; hankering to take their first potshot and lapsing into some orgasmic reverie at the very prospect. It’s not, I assure you (for whatever it’s worth) an entirely true, complete or faithful [...]
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REVIEW: The Pirates of Penzance | Opera Theatre, Sydney
It’s also known as The Slave of Duty. Bet you didn’t know that. You did? Smartarse. What Opera Australia’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance is slave to is the deservedly successful cinematic franchise, Pirates of The Caribbean. Apart from anything else, it’s a cunning marketing strategy to bounce off the popularity [...]
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REVIEW: West Side Story | Regent Theatre, Melbourne
David Letterman does this bit where he talks about gang violence in New York — it’s out of control, they’re terrorising the streets, etc; he builds it up beautifully — and then plays a scene from West Side Story of the Jets prancing down the street. Oh, how I laugh… I mean, for a story [...]
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REVIEW: All About My Mother | Sumner Theatre, Melbourne
This is unquestionably an evocative piece of theatre. MTC faithfully captures Almodóvar’s generous spirit; a story rich in ideas of love and loss and the search for identity and acceptance. The film presumably transcends its soapy presence. This, for reasons that still baffle me a little, doesn’t.
READ MORETheatre needs a true governing body to drive funding
Troy Dodds of AussieTheatre.com writes: You’ve got to love that the term ‘political turmoil’ in Australia simply means uncertainty over the prime minister and negotiations with independent and Green MPs, as opposed to fighting in the streets, roadside bombs and political assassinations. You’ve also got to love that polling day doesn’t mean heavily armed security, but [...]
READ MOREREVIEW: The Trial | Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne
Franz Kafka’s The Trial is a blackly ironic vision of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy in such a vision means not only the office blocks, government officials, legal proceedings and clerical work with which Kafka himself was personally familiar: it also means, symbolically, the process of obfuscation which springs up spontaneously in such organised societies as have lost [...]
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REVIEW: August: Osage County | Sydney Theatre
I confess: I baulk at the notion of a fully-imported play. I had questions and doubts when Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton brought the joint venture Long Day’s Journey to Sydney Theatre, so the questions and doubts may be the same in principle now, but the scale is grander (you’ve only got to get a [...]
READ MOREREVIEW: Tusk Tusk | Wharf 1, Sydney
Wow. Two Sydney Theatre Company openings on consecutive nights and, it should be said, the first (August: Osage County) was an impossible act to follow. So anything that hits the creditable mark the very next evening is doing pretty well. Tusk Tusk, from 22-year-old playwright Polly Stenham, hits that mark. And to the immense credit of its [...]
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