Known to practically everyone bar the stuffiest bureaucracies as Brad Syke, he is a writer, creative director, journalist, broadcaster, filmmaker, bon vivant and almost politician, who cleaves heavily, and unashamedly to the left. Hell, he’s even left-handed. If there was ever a self-confessed, unremediated, irredeemably bleeding-heart, small l liberal, he’s it. In his spare time, he enjoys catwalk modelling and rocket science. Oh, and the odd bit of performance art. (Very odd, sometimes.) He relishes ridicule and abuse from neocon ratbags and will give as good as he gets; only moreso. You have been warned.
A confession: I’ve never seen An Officer and a Gentleman. As in the 1982 film, starring Richard Gere, Debra Winger and Lousi Gossett Jr., directed by Taylor Hackford. You’ll, of course, make up your own minds as to whether this is a good, bad, or neutral thing, in terms of my qualification to review the [...]
Anne Wilson premiered cabaret act What I Did For Love at the 2010 Sydney Fringe Festival. That was at Notes, a rather expansive, impersonal setting for an intimate show, so, dingy and dilapidated as Kings Cross’ El Rocco now is, it was arguably a more conducive space for such. Frankly, it still deserves better, but finding a [...]
The story of Yevgeny (Eugene) Onegin started, of course, with master-poet Alexander Pushkin’s verse-novel (389 stanzas, no less of iambic tetrameter; so-called Onegin stanzas, or Pushkin sonnet), a classic of Russian literature which began to be serialised in 1825. Onegin, the character, has since served as a ‘role model’ for numerous Russian men of fiction. [...]
David Williamson seems to think Crikey has it in for him. But his latest play, When Dad Married Fury, shows sparks and flashes of the classic Williamson of old, his kiln fired by sociopolitical fury; yes, when David was married to fury. Not the white-haired, wilting Willo who has so much been in our midst [...]
Benedict Andrews’ recent, desperately ill-fated foray into the esteemed space of Belvoir Upstairs came replete with extensive programmatic director’s notes which were better than the actual script. Simon Stone, another of our theatre’s fashionable, youngish things, has indulged the same privilege, justifying, at length, his contemporary take on Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, which draws upon [...]
Force Majeure, as the name implies, is a force, in theatre, to be reckoned with. Food is a co-production with Belvoir St Theatre in its downstairs space, which serves to mitigate against the travesty still running upstairs and redeem the theatre. Written by Steve Rodgers and co-directed by same, alongside resident director (and choreographer) Kate [...]
What a relief. It was grave sense of foreboding I approached the Australian Theatre For Young People for the opening of its second production of the season. The first, Cockroach, recommended itself only for extermination. I needn’t have feared. The prolific, energetic Netta Yashchin’s adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm turned things right ’round. Distinguished, [...]
Like so many of the retro crop of plays that’s been surfacing lately, for many, if not most of us, our primary association and reference-point is likely to be through Nobel prize-winning novelist William Golding’s 1954 debut novel, the film that followed about a decade after or, perhaps, both. It wasn’t until circa 1995, as [...]
It’s not as if there isn’t considerable and considerably impressive craft brought to bear in Yumi Umiumare’s critically-acclaimed solo work, EnTrance, which opened Performance Space’s new season at CarriageWorks last week. As far as I’m aware it’s Umiumare’s debut in Sydney. In Melbourne, she’s already been warmly embraced. The Age, for example, has waxed especially lyrically: [...]
Manly isn’t and will probably be the centre of the theatrical universe. Not even close. But lurking just behind the famous beach and promenade lined with towering Norfolk pines is one of Sydney’s most functional small theatres. Star Of The Sea has for a long time been home base for the anachronistically-named Factory Space Theatre, [...]
