June, 2011

“You won’t see that at Cirque du Soleil,” jokes one rubbery Circus Oz performer after a particularly silly piece of slapstick from industrious new show Steampowered. Well, indeed. Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian magicians of franchised gymnastic entertainment, packed up its tent in May. They jump higher. Swing further. Balance longer. Take breath away from [...]

It all began so well. Anthony Neilson’s confessional, creative battle with the dreaded black dog is aesthetically enchanting, having both alluring colour, texture and a special kind of timeless velocity that reaches back into the deep, dark past and moves uneasily towards a very uncertain future. Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 1 production boasts luminous performances [...]

They’re called “post”. Yes, with a lower-case p, in deference to the digital. Zoe Coombs Marr. Mish Grigor. Natalie Rose. And, since the last is preggers, or nursing the aftermath, Eden Falk has stepped in, as both performer and deviser, to fill her shoes. Think of the laughable mock drama of Idol, MasterChef, what-have-you, and [...]

The Melbourne Theatre Company boasts, quite rightly, it now has three home-grown Melbourne writers on its stages: Joanna Murray-Smith’s The Gift at the Sumner Theatre, Ian Wilding’s premiere new work The Water Carriers at its black-box Lawler space (opening Friday) and at the Arts Centre’s Fairfax Studio this wise-arse new play from Robert Reid, The [...]

I don’t care if Christopher Shinn is a Pulitzer-puller: The Coming World stinks. It pretends to tackle The Big Issues and fails miserably. Of course, my view isn’t likely to be a popular one. London’s Daily Telegraph, for example, described it as “a haunting, subtly constructed play”. Well, it might’ve been. It could’ve been. It [...]

Charles Gounod needed a good editor. The third act of Faust — of five, clocking in at around three hours — really drags, especially. He’s been granted his dream girl, exchanged with the devil for his soul, and successfully wooed her — so quit goofing around and seal the deal. The foreplay is laborious. It [...]

I was none too flattering, or at least somewhat equivocal, with regard to Sydney Theatre Company’s co-production, late last year, of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya. Despite a stellar cast, it didn’t quite hit the mark. Andrew Upton and co have been more successful with another of his adaptations, of another Russian play: The White Guard, by [...]

This is what Tony Abbott was talking about: class warfare. Pitting the haves (wealth/happiness/cultivation/freedom) and the nots against each other. Familiar ground for generations of dramatists. At least for a while. Somewhere near the middle of the second act Joanna Murray-Smith’s new play sharply deviates like the political debate never will. What begins as a David [...]

The Russians are coming! Actually, they’ve already arrived. And they’re everywhere. Not in Soviet-era tanks, but theatrical garb. Chekhov. Bulgakov. Adaptations by Benedict Andrews and Andrew Upton. For Belvoir. Sydney Theatre Company. Perhaps, in STC’s case at least, it’s to balance out the heavy leaning towards American plays we saw in 2010. Benedict Andrews has [...]