What the Butler Saw
by Joe Orton
State Theatre Company
Playhouse
Joe Orton’s plays are not everybody’s cup of tee hee. There is humour that confirms our sense of the world and there is humour which unsettles it and Orton is definitely the latter. His comedy, all elliptical word play and glassy epigrams, has the mannered artificiality of Wilde. But unlike Oscar, Orton is not endearing. His is pitiless, unlikeable comedy and when he makes you laugh it often sticks …
Continue Reading Back to top1992
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare
‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore
John Ford
State Theatre Company
Playhouse
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Simon Phillips’ season of classics in tandem, -Elizabethan and Jacobean, comedy and tragedy, dream and nightmare- is an ambitious one. It is physically demanding on actors, tricky to design and difficult to publicise. More than just works in repertory, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore have been joined at the hip, or more likely …
Continue Reading Back to top1992
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare
‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore
John Ford
State Theatre Company
Playhouse
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Simon Phillips’ season of classics in tandem, -Elizabethan and Jacobean, comedy and tragedy, dream and nightmare- is an ambitious one. It is physically demanding on actors, tricky to design and difficult to publicise. More than just works in repertory, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore have been joined at the hip, or more likely …
Continue Reading Back to topSurely we’re all mad people, and they
Whom we think are, are not.
-The Revenger’s Tragedy
Is the world mad ?
I’m not paid to quarrel with accepted facts.
– Joe Orton
Joe Orton’s plays are disquietingly funny not because of their nihilism but because of their relentless logic. Few satirists are as unsparing of human behaviour and of human institutions. The lineage probably begins with Kafka. In The Trial, the authorities knock at the door of Josef K, arrest …
Continue Reading Back to topMoney and Friends
David Williamson
State Theatre Company presents
RQTC, Queensland’s State Theatre Company
Playhouse
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
There is an increasingly widespread perception that David Williamson is a man more sinned against than sinning, that after more than twenty years he has not been embraced for the plays he has given us and the institution he has become. He is presented as our loftiest poppy, a Gulliver of the theatre constantly needled by Lilliputian envy and peevishness.
This …
Continue Reading Back to top1992
Murray Bramwell talks to Director Simon Phillips and Designer Shaun Gurton about their forthcoming season of classics in tandem
The State Theatre Company’s first in-house production for the year is a double bill – or more correctly, a Bill and a John. Performed in repertory, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore represent what the company are calling in their promotion two classic tales of forbidden love. Certainly when Lysander, the confused …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
Cabaret
State Theatre Company
in association with the Australian Dance Theatre
Playhouse
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
The full credits for Cabaret are quite a mouthful – Book by Joe Masteroff, based on a play by John Van Druten and stories by Christopher Isherwood, Music by John Kander, Lyrics by Fred Ebb, Originally Produced and Directed on the New York Stage by Harold Prince. State’s Christmas knees-up production, in conjuction with ADT, has a cast of eight, a chorus of …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
Shaun Gurton talks with Murray Bramwell about his designs for the Adelaide Festival and the State Theatre Company’s final show for the 1991 season- Cabaret.
It has been a busy year for Shaun Gurton. Apart from designing five of this season’s productions, the Associate Director of the State Theatre Company went on a six week exchange to China. He also designed Mer de Glace, Richard Meale’s new work for the Australian Opera. His most recent projects have been designing …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
A Flea in her Ear
by Georges Feydeau
State Theatre Company
Playhouse
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
In Feydeau it only needs one person to get a bee in his bonnet or a flea in her ear and it’s all va from then on. Like Labiche and Courteline, Feydeau’s farce is extra-marital, extra-mural and distinctly extra-curricular. But as with Keats’s mad pursuit and maidens loth, things are in a fairly permanent state of interruptus and the delinquent bourgeois, demented by …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
Jonah
Book and Lyrics by John Romeril
Music by Alan John
State Theatre Company
Space
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
It is not hard to see why John Romeril would be attracted to Jonah. With its temper democratic; bias offensively Australian, Louis Stone’s naturalistic tale of the Botany Road push, circa 1905, gathers around it many of the elements of Romeril’s own work. It is accessible and generous-hearted, a likeable yarn with a darkly mythic logic. The story of Jonah …
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