murraybramwell.com

December 01, 1996

Cold Comfort

Filed under: Archive,Australian Texts,State Theatre Company,Theatre

The Fire on the Snow
by Douglas Stewart

State Theatre
Playhouse

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

I admit to having some apprehension about this production. The advance publicity suggested eccentricity in the design and the idea of cross-casting struck me as arbitrary. And, having been raised on the boys’ own annuals of the fifties, I wasn’t sure there was much about the legend of Robert Falcon Scott that held any further interest for me either. However, as it happens, I had …

Continue Reading Back to top

Chekhov, Too

Filed under: Adelaide Companies,Archive,Theatre

(Uncle) Vanya
by Howard Barker

Brink Productions
Red Shed

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Howard Barker’s version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is not so much deconstruction as detonation. He has taken one of the great plays of the modern era and turned it into intertextual terrorism. Not since Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead ( or Barker’s own Women Beware Women) has a play so successfully roosted under the roof of another. But unlike Stoppard’s hit, Barker’s Vanya is no …

Continue Reading Back to top

November 01, 1996

Entanglements

Filed under: Adelaide Companies,Archive,Theatre

1996

Knots

Double Bind Company

Tandanya

DARKpaths

Stephen Sewell

Junction Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

As the psychiatrist R.D.Laing moved from clinical practice to social commentary, from the Divided Self to the Politics of Experience, he began to write in different forms. One of his most accessible, engaging and incisive works is Knots, a slim volume of psycho-conundra elaborating the many ways relationships can get tangled. Laing called them double binds and that is the name taken by director/composer …

Continue Reading Back to top

October 01, 1996

Past Lives

Filed under: Archive,Australian Texts,Interstate,Theatre

Good Works
Nick Enright
Playbox
in association with Adelaide Festival Centre Trust
Space

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It has been too long since Nick Enright’s writing has featured on the Adelaide stage. Can it be On the Wallaby -back in 1981 ? So far, recent works such as A Property of the Clan and Blackrock have not been seen here, although we will soon be seeing double with State Theatre’s revival of his adaptation of The Venetian Twins coming up …

Continue Reading Back to top

Down at the End of Lonely Street

Filed under: Adelaide Companies,Archive,Australian Texts,Theatre

Terminus
Daniel Keene
Red Shed Company

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The Red Shed Company continues its productive collaboration with Melbourne playwright Daniel Keene with one of their best productions in some time. Terminus, Keene’s newest work commissioned by the Shed, follows other company successes- All Souls, the two-handers Low and Silent Partner and SA Premier’s Award winner, Because You Are Mine.

Keene’s plays, though varied in subject matter, have distinctive tropes. Densely poetic, socially deterministic and infused with dread they …

Continue Reading Back to top

Highlight

Filed under: Archive,Interstate,Theatre

Skylight
David Hare
Melbourne Theatre Company
in association with Adelaide Festival Centre Trust
Space

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It has been a good time for The Adelaide Festival Centre Trust and a good time for the Space. The so-called World Theatre program brought in Nick Enright’s Good Works and now David Hare’s Skylight. They are both good plays and in the modest confines of the Space they have also given us absorbing performances.

David Hare’s writing suggests many things. The …

Continue Reading Back to top

Guys and Dolls

Filed under: Archive,Australian Texts,Interstate,Theatre

Summer of the Seventeeth Doll
Ray Lawler

Melbourne Theatre Company
in association with State Theatre
Playhouse

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

I have to say that I greeted the revival of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll with some trepidation. Its reputation, shall we say its legend, is a kind of tyranny – not least probably, to Ray Lawler himself. The Doll is an acknowledged turning point, a setting for historical watches, a kind of cultural synecdoche. It is also a convenient …

Continue Reading Back to top

September 01, 1996

Writing and Re-righting

Filed under: Archive,Australian Texts,Interstate,Theatre

Dead White Males
by David Williamson

Sydney Theatre Company
in association with the Adelaide Festival Centre Trust
Her Majesty’s

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

There is nothing that David Williamson won’t grab by the tail and swing into the theatrical arena. Whether it is the protocols of the New Rich, the ethical obligations of lawyers and journalists, the complexities of sexual harassment procedures, the truth of anthropological research or-as in Dead White Males- the arcana of cultural and literary theory. It …

Continue Reading Back to top

Pressing Issues

Filed under: Archive,Australian Texts,State Theatre Company,Theatre

The Torrents
by Oriel Gray

State Theatre
The Playhouse

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The Torrents stands in our theatre history as a road not taken. Or a twin separated at birth and raised in obscurity. As the co-winner of the 1955 Playwrights’ Advisory Board competition, Oriel Gray might have expected greater recognition for her work as playwright with the New Theatre in Sydney. In fact The Torrents was only staged twice -by New Theatre in Adelaide in 1956 and in …

Continue Reading Back to top

Boots and All

Filed under: Archive,Australian Texts,Interstate,Theatre

Tap Dogs
Her Majesty’s

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

From the moment it premiered at the Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf in January last year Tap Dogs has been a thumping success -as Adelaide testified when we saw them in the Space only a month later. National and international tours followed, including headline performances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Currently there are two companies performing, one in the UK the other on extended tour from Perth to Lismore and all watering holes …

Continue Reading Back to top
« Newer Posts — Older Posts »