1990

State Theatre Company Director, Simon Phillips talks to Murray Bramwell about progress on his newest project, an adaptation of Boccaccio’s Decameron opening in the Space next Saturday.

“If the Archbishop has departed have it given on my behalf to Cenni Bardella; let him send it to me at L’Aquila or Sulmona; otherwise, do send it to me yourself by one who you believe will deliver it to my hand; and do be most careful that messer Neri shall not …

Restoration
By Edward Bond

State Theatre Company
Playhouse

“I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society.” Edward Bond’s plays have reiterated this theme from the first. But for him violence is not innate, some kind of blight in the DNA; it is the consequence of social structures and symptomatic of class-based injustice. That is what Saved is about, and his powerful re-telling of Shakespeare’s Lear.

It is also the …

1990

Quickies

State Theatre Company

Space, June 1990

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The first thing to say about Quickies is that they are a welcome addition to the State Theatre Company’s card. Combining the formula for the 1986 Shorts season- recent works performed by the State and Magpie ensembles, directed by a variety of guests – with State’s long-standing practice of offering public readings of plays by SA dramatists, the result is a double season of works by local writers …

1990

The Comedy of Errors
by William Shakespeare
State Theatre Company
Playhouse, April 1990

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The Comedy of Errors might have been entitled The Comedy of Preposterous Situations. I mean, really. Twin boys are born in Ephesus and, at the same time in the same household, twin servants- both pairs identical. Then, in some nautical kerfuffle both sets of twins are separated and, before you know it, they have grown up in different cities unaware of each …

1990

Murray Bramwell talks with the State Theatre Company’s Simon Philips about their latest production, The Comedy of Errors, which opens next Saturday.

Simon Phillips is in rehearsal mode. It is well after six o’clock and the afternoon session has only just finished. Wandering barefoot back to his office for the interview, Phillips is looking weary. Gradually as actors begin appearing, it dawns on him that there is another rehearsal set for seven. A less genial soul might have …

1990

Murray Bramwell

I first met John Gaden just over four years ago when his appointment as Artistic Director of the State Theatre had just been announced and he had flown in to meet the Adelaide theatre faithful.He confided to me that he was being forced to consume tea and scones in life-threatening quantities but with characteristic courteousy and pragmatism,he circulated without demur. Gaden has continued to conduct this tea and scones diplomacy throughout his tenure with State because, to …

Ring Around the Moon
byJean Anouilh, adapted by Christopher Fry

State Theatre Company
Playhouse, December 1989.

The State Theatre Company has closed shop for the year with Rodney Fisher’s production of Anouilh’s L’Invitation au Chateau, better known, having been turned over-easy by Christopher Fry, as Ring Around the Moon. Written in 1947 it was first presented to English audiences in 1950 by Peter Brook . He called it a “charade with music” and its enormous success, it has been suggested, …

1989

The Rover by Aphra Behn

State Theatre Company of South Australia
The Playhouse, Adelaide, June 1989.
then York Theatre and Seymour Centre, Sydney.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

“All women together should let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn … for it is she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” Thus wrote Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. But it would be mistaken to perpetuate the notion that Behn was the first, or …

1989

Murray Bramwell talks to director Angela Chaplin and writer Gillian Rubenstein about Magpie Theatre’s current project at Theatre 62 – an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland

Since it first appeared on July 4th 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has become not only a classic work but an integral part of the modern consciousness. Translated into fifty languages and published in countless editions it has also been adapted for both stage and screen. Most people know something about …

1989

Hedda Gabler
By Henrik Ibsen
State Theatre Company
Playhouse, October, 1989.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Ibsen’s plays, including the great works of his last phase of writing in the 1890s, operate on two levels – they are convincingly anchored in middle and upper class life in 19th century Europe at the same time as being dramas of what in classical literature is called psychomachia, the conflict of the soul.

Hedda Gabler is a Grade A example. In his copious, …