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October 01, 1986

Street from the Heart

Filed under: Adelaide Companies,Archive,Theatre

Street from the Heart
A Streetcar Named Desire
Harvest Theatre Co.,
The Arts Theatre

The Harvest Theatre Company wended its way to Adelaide recently for a season at the Arts Theatre of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. In keeping with Harvest’s charter, this production has toured regional centres in Western Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, playing more than forty performances and linking with local theatre groups along the way.

It must be quite a punishing schedule but there …

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The State of Play

Filed under: Archive,Interviews,State Theatre Company,Theatre

John Gaden, Artistic Director of the State Theatre Company of South Australia, reflects in midseason.

I first met John Gaden in October last year when the State Theatre Company was announcing his appointment as its new AD. 1985 had been a troubled year for State with a number of productions in succession hitting the wall as the local press grew more toxic and audiences more disheartened .

So Gaden’s appointment was greeted warmly from all sides. As a popular actor …

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September 01, 1986

Sorry Truth

Filed under: Archive,State Theatre Company,Theatre

Pravda
State Theatre Company
The Playhouse

As players of Trivial Pursuit well know, Pravda means truth, and in Howard Brenton and David Hare’s play the State Theatre Company reminds us that the Western press is as unlikely as any other to give us the whole Pravda and nothing but the pravda on the things that matter most.

Both Brenton and Hare have enjoyed success as playwrights over the past fifteen years or so and have collaborated previously on a play …

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August 01, 1986

Iron Failings

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

Essington Lewis: I am Work
by John O’Donoghue
State Theatre Company
The Playhouse

John O’Donoghue’s acclaimed Essington Lewis: I Am Work has been included in the State Theatre Company’s current season after the late scratching of Jonah Jones from the 1986 card.

Essington Lewis was first performed by the Hunter Valley Players in 1981, and enjoyed a highly successful season in Sydney last year. But the present production has not just been parachuted in from the East. West Australian actor …

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June 13, 1986

Wagner’s Depths Explored

Filed under: Adelaide Companies,Archive,Music,National Times,Theatre

The Flying Dutchman by Richard Wagner; director Bernd Benthaak; with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. conducted by John Matheson; at the Opera Theatre. Adelaide, until June 21. Cast: Malcolm Donnelly, Beverley Bergen, Arend Baumann and Thomas Edmonds.

Commentators have often been swift to chide and slow to bless The Flying Dutchman when comparing it to the consummate accomplishment of Wagner’s later work.

Certainly its mechanical division between aria, recitative and ensemble is typical of operatic form which Wagner himself was later …

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June 01, 1986

Potent cheap music

Filed under: Archive,National Times,State Theatre Company,Theatre

The Real Thing, by Tom Stoppard; co-directed John Gaden and Gale Edwards; designer Roger Kirk; at Adelaide Festival Centre Playhouse until June 28.

Cast: Lynette Curran. John Gaden, Deborah Kennedy, Anna Lee, Andrew Tighe, Paul Williams, Ross Williams.

In dealing with the veerings, predations and yearnings of the human heart, Tom Stoppard’s play, The Real Thing; is indisputably about real things but his penchant for Chinese boxes has turned the play into a set of dodgy refractions which make complexity …

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March 21, 1986

First day at school

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

Magpie Theatre Company’s production of David Holman’s new play The Small Poppies has opened at Theatre 62 in Adelaide.

Directed by Geoffrey Rush with music composed by Moya Henderson and recorded for performance by the Australian String Quartet, The Small Poppies is about three little tackers on their first day at school.

Typically of David Holman’s work -and this is his 70th play – The Small Poppies makes its intentions very clear. It is for five-year-olds and all who want …

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March 07, 1986

Audacity carries the day

Filed under: Archive,Australian Texts,Festival,National Times,State Theatre Company,Theatre

Adelaide’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 …

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March 01, 1986

Billie Rocks

Filed under: Archive,Festival,International,Theatre

Rockaby
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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December 06, 1985

Sparing an audience unease

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

Adelaide’s Stage Company has made a strong finish to its 1985 season with John Noble’s production of David Williamson’s Sons of Cain which has opened in the Festival Centre Space.

As readers of these columns already know, Sons of Cain is a drame a clef you don’t need to be a locksmith to pick. It deals with a certain national weekly with a feisty editor and tenacious journalists committed to investigative reporting and shows why there are a thousand stories …

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