Private Lives
By Noel Coward

State Theatre Company of South Australia
and Queensland Theatre Company
Dunstan Playhouse
Until December 13, 2006.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Of Private Lives, a play he wrote in four days in 1929 while staying at the Cathay Hotel in Shanghai, Noel Coward remarked it “was well-constructed on the whole, but psychologically unstable.” He describes writing it propped up in bed with a writing block and an Eversharp pencil – and it is certainly an eversharp …

Uncle Vanya
by Anton Chekhov
Translated by Adam Cook

State Theatre Company
Dunstan Playhouse
Until November 4.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Anton Chekhov has often bewildered his associates in the theatre. He used the term comedy to describe The Seagull, a play which ends in suicide, The Cherry Orchard was similarly designated but audiences saw only melancholy and pessimism for the future. Uncle Vanya, developed from an earlier version entitled The Wood Demon, he described as “Scenes from Country Life” …

2006
Murray Bramwell

Uncle Vanya
by Anton Chekhov
Translated by Adam Cook

State Theatre Company of South Australia
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
October 17. Tickets $13.50 – 50. Bookings : BASS 131 246
Until 4 November, 2006.

Chekhov has challenged directors from the beginning. Stanislavsky found The Seagull such a puzzle he was prompted to invent an entirely new approach to actor training. Of Uncle Vanya, the second of the four great dramas which Chekhov wrote in the last …

2006

Away
by Michael Gow

Queensland Theatre Company
and Griffin Theatre Company
Dunstan Playhouse
Until September 23, 2006.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

There can be few Australian plays as mercurial as Away. Written in the mid-Eighties, but set in the late Sixties, it focuses on three families going “away” for their summer holidays. It is full of affectionate retro-detail of Australian beach culture, but its central themes are of loss and death and the struggle to accept the inevitable and …

Michael Gow talks about his play, Away, twenty years after its first performance.

Murray Bramwell

When the Griffin Theatre production of Away opened at the Stables in Sydney on January 7, 1986, no-one, least of all thirty-one year old playwright, Michael Gow, had any idea what a successful, and much beloved play it would become. Written swiftly between November 1985 and the following January, the play reflected Gow’s preoccupations at that time:

“It was partly turning thirty and asking ‘how …