Beauty and the Beast
by David Holman
Magpie Theatre Company, South Australia
Directed by Chris Johnson
Design: Julie Lynch. Music: Alan John.
Cast: Annabel Giles, Sharon LeRay, Claudia LaRose,
Michael Habib, Tom Considine, Tim Aris.
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
This is the third Adelaide Festival in which the Magpie Theatre
Company has staged a new work by David Holman. It was the celebrated No Worries in 1984, and in 1986 The Small Poppies. But with Beauty and the Beast it …
1841
by Michael Gow
State Theatre Company
Playhouse
Theatre commissions are a bit like cargo cults. Titles are announced, brochures printed, runways are built and everybody waits for the play to land triumphantly. Except that, more often than not, it either overshoots the tarmac or pancakes unceremoniously in the midst of consternation and disbelief.
When the State Theatre Company secured the services of Michael Gow to write a play for the 1988 Adelaide Festival with additional support from the Bicentennial …
Continue Reading Back to topCircus Oz
Rymill Park
Circus Oz were always more fun than a bucket of frogs and their Tenth Anniversary World Tour performances at the Festival must be the best yet. They have an effortless mix of physical skill, adroit comedy, musical flair and sheer good nature.
Tim Coldwell, a founding member of the company, is a genial sight in his baggy suit and size 13 sneakers and straight away the show establishes an easy rapport with the audience.
A Bicentennial …
Continue Reading Back to topThe Mahabharata
Adapted by Jean-Claude Carriere
Directed by Peter Brook
Anstey’s Hill Quarry
The Mahabharata is a colossal work. Written in Sanskrit, the first versions date back 400 hundred years BC. Then, for nearly eight centuries this epic poem grew to more than one hundred thousand stanzas. Fifteen times longer than The Bible, it is like the Old and New Testaments, all of Homer and thirty years of Mandrake and the Phantom all rolled into one.
Peter Brook and playwright …
Continue Reading Back to topMaximus
Circus Oz
Rymill Park
Circus Oz were always more fun than a bucket of frogs and their Tenth Anniversary World Tour performances at the Festival must be the best yet.
They have an effortless mix of physical skill, adroit comedy, musical flair and sheer good nature. Tim Coldwell, a founding member of the company, is a genial sight in his baggy suit and size 13 sneakers and straight away the show establishes an · easy rapport with the audience.…
Continue Reading Back to topCome Out 1987 was a testing time for youth theatre. After the sporadic bookings in 1985, directors Malcolm Moore and Kerry Comerford were faced with the task of not only compiling an appealing programme, but also filling theatre seats. They did well on both counts. Also, with ASSITEJ, the international jamboree of youth theatre heavies, being held in Adelaide at the same time, Come Out was on International display.
Director Michael Fitzgerald made it plain that ASSITEJ might turn into …
Continue Reading Back to topCome Out
The Come Out Festival started in 1974 because many professionals in the arts and education were peeved that the Adelaide Festival was taking no notice of young people in the performing arts. They set up in various parks in inner Adelaide and the momentum began. It was then decided that Come Out would utilise the Adelaide Festival’s administrative resources in the “off” year between Festivals and plan a full-scale programme of the kind that has been offered now …
Continue Reading Back to topVery few performance artists have made the leap to pop with such spectacular success as Laurie Anderson whose concert in Adelaide’s Festival Theatre opened her Australian tour and coincides with the release of her newest album, Home of the Brave.
All of the paradoxes of Anderson’s achievements are evident in her opening monologue, Progress. The eclectic, hi -tech relativism of her work exactly mirrors the processes she rails against as heartless progress. Anderson’s is a triumph of style …
Continue Reading Back to topAdelaide’s State Theatre Company has premiered Stephen Sewell’s Dreams in an Empty City, directed by Neil Armfield, as its Festival offering in the Playhouse.
Ever since State’s and Armfield’s production of Sewell’s earlier play, The Blind Giant is Dancing, astonished admiring audiences in 1983 there has been great anticipation of this new work.
Stephen Sewell’s dramatic writing is extraordinary both in its scope, which is almost hubristically epic, and in the appalling risks he takes …
Continue Reading Back to topRockaby
By Samuel Beckett
Billie Whitelaw
Union Theatre
“This,” Billie Whitelaw announced pointing to the bright blue cover of her script folder, “is the most cheerful thing you’ll see all evening.” Maybe it was meant to be disarming to the audience but it momentarily short-circuited the possibilities of the evening by reinforcing Beckett’s popular reputation, or rather his notoriety, as a joyless nihilist who wrote those now rather old hat plays about loitering tramps and people in rubbish bins.
The …
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