murraybramwell.com

February 17, 2023

Guffaws and vengeance in a tale of family woe

The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?
by Edward Albee.
State Theatre Company South Australia
and Sydney Theatre Company.
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre.
February 14. Bookings: statetheatrecompany.com.au
Tickets: $49-95. Until February 25.
Duration : 100 minutes. No interval.

Sydney Theatre Company season
at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, Sydney,
March 2 -25. Tickets : $65- $125.

Murray Bramwell

It’s in the title of the play so it doesn’t need a spoiler alert. We know who Sylvia is. She is a goat. …

Continue Reading Back to top

October 08, 2022

Theatre: The Normal Heart

InDaily InReview

State Theatre Company’s excellent revival of Larry Kramer’s incendiary account of the early years of the AIDS crisis in New York is a compelling reminder of another epidemic where some are timely and heroic in their response, while others choose to look away.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The writer and social critic, Susan Sontag called him one of America’s most valuable troublemakers. Larry Kramer was the founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first organisation formed to …

Continue Reading Back to top

August 10, 2022

Theatre Review: Chalkface

InDaily Review
Theatre: Chalkface
Written by Murray Bramwell.

Angela Betzien’s Chalkface, premiered by State Theatre, is a zany portrait of an Australian public primary school. It holds up a cracked and grimly funny mirror to the end-result of years of state neglect and disrespect for teachers and their profession.

Many essential institutions have been exposed and found wanting during the Pandemic – the health system is one, another is education. Not the lavishly funded private system, but the increasingly …

Continue Reading Back to top

May 12, 2022

Theatre Review: Cathedral

Set on the Limestone Coast, Caleb Lewis’ fine new play (featuring the outstanding Nathan O’Keefe) is not only a deep dive into the depths of grief and loss, it is also about returning to the replenishing light of day.

Murray Bramwell

“Picanninie Ponds is a system of sinkholes on South Australia’s limestone coast, just south of Mt Gambier,“ explains Caleb Lewis, in the program notes of State Theatre’s latest production. It is where his father, a dive instructor, took him …

Continue Reading Back to top

March 27, 2022

Music Theatre: Girl From the North Country

This extraordinary mix of Conor McPherson’s masterly storytelling and his astute use of Bob Dylan songs has given the stage musical new heft and new meaning.

Written by Murray Bramwell

On that day in 2013, when plans were set in motion to create a theatre work using the songs of Bob Dylan, the planets were definitely in auspicious alignment. Because Girl From the North Country, which first opened in London in 2017, exceeds all expectations and seems to have created …

Continue Reading Back to top

March 15, 2022

Adelaide Festival – Theatre : The Picture of Dorian Gray

With dazzling stagecraft and an extraordinary solo performance by Eryn Jean Norvill, this screenshot of Dorian is a Wilde ride.

“The first duty of life is to assume a pose,” Oscar Wilde declared, “what the second duty is no one yet has found out.” As his biographer Richard Ellmann noted – “Wilde had been much concerned with images . He had painted self-portrait after self portrait.” He was referring to Oscar’s variety of beards, his curled hair and foppish costumes …

Continue Reading Back to top

March 04, 2022

Adelaide Festival – Twists in tales of surprise, suspense

Blindness
Adapted by Simon Stephens
Based on the novel by Jose Saramago
Donmar Warehouse.
Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide.
Tickets: $20-$79. Bookings: adelaidefestival.com
February 24. Duration : 70 mins.
Until March 20.
Also: Merrigong Theatre Company, Illawarra Town Hall, Wollongong.
May 11- 15.

Girls & Boys
By Dennis Kelly
State Theatre Company South Australia
Odeon Theatre, Norwood.
Tickets : $44- $80. Bookings: statetheatrecompany.com.au
March 1. Duration: 105 minutes.
Until March 12.

A motorist, in traffic as the lights change, comes to a …

Continue Reading Back to top

November 16, 2021

Comedy of manners for quarrelsome age

Eureka Day
by Jonathan Spector
State Theatre South Australia.
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre.
November 16. Tickets $39 – $79.
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
Duration : 130 minutes (including interval)
Until November 27.

Californian playwright, Jonathan Spector could not have known, when his sparklingly witty comedy of ethics opened in Berkeley in April 2018, that Eureka Day would be so alarmingly prescient of the corrosive social divisions in a global pandemic.

Set in the Eureka Day Community school, the play opens on …

Continue Reading Back to top

August 18, 2021

Theatre review: Hibernation

InDaily
Murray Bramwell

Theatre review: Hibernation

Hibernation, State Theatre’s engaging and theatrically inventive new play, is not only a wake-up call about the climate crisis, it reminds us that to fix the planet we really have to fix ourselves.

Not often does a play seem to have been conjured from the most recent news headlines, but Hibernation is one of them. Writer Finegan Kruckemeyer describes beginning his draft in 2019- “and the writing of that world strangely became the …

Continue Reading Back to top

June 09, 2021

Theatre: The Appleton Ladies’ Potato Race

State Theatre’s exuberant and entertaining new production is set in a small rural town where nothing changes, but change is overdue. Five women from Appleton chew through some timely questions about fairness, opportunity and gender equity.

Written by Murray Bramwell

“The potato race is a real thing,” writer Melanie Tait tells us in her program note for The Appleton Ladies’ Potato Race, “It happens every year in my hometown…” Her town is not called Appleton though, it is Robertson …

Continue Reading Back to top
Older Posts »