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, …

1989

Shirley Valentine
by Willy Russell

State Theatre Company/
Sydney Theatre Company
The Playhouse,

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Playwright Willy Russell not only touched the zeitgeist with his stage hit, Educating Rita, he also hit paydirt. The screen version launched Julie Walters as a performer with presence and showed there could be life after flab for Michael Caine. Essentially, Educating Rita was Pygmalion Revisited with just a smidge of feminism to keep it a la mode. On film, at least, …

The Tempest
William Shakespeare
State Theatre Company
Playhouse

During his stint as Artistic Director for the State Theatre Company, John Gaden has been closely associated with four Shakespearean productions – Much Ado About Nothing and The Winter’s Tale which he co-directed with Gale Edwards, as the lead in King Lear directed by Edwards, and now, The Tempest in which he directs but does not perform.

With little more than six months left with State, Gaden might have been tempted to …

Speed-The-Plow
by David Mamet
State Theatre Company
Space

David Mamet wrote his first plays when he was teaching acting. Tired of trying to find new exercises for students, he began making up his own. An essential part of building a character as Stanislavski will tell you, is ‘ determining what he or she wants from others in the play ‘ and David Mamet constructs intricate, subtle and disturbing theatre around these questions.

Mamet has written more than twenty plays as …

A Month Of Sundays
by Bob Larbey
State Theatre Company
Playhouse

After two very successful stints in Sydney, the Northside Theatre production of A Month of Sundays is now opening the card for the State Theatre Company’s 1989 season. It is an astute choice because the play is so reassuringly conventional that it will please a wide audience but it still has substance enough for those who don’t need everything on the stage to have whiskers and a tail.

Playwright …

Seagull
Anton Chekhov
Directed by Aubrey Mellor
State Theatre Company
Playhouse.

The question of whether Chekhov’s drama is comic or tragic has become a hoary one. But it is nevertheless important. In not quite a hundred years critical opinion has run from one side of the boat to the other. In his influential Moscow Art Theatre productions, Stanislavsky- systematically curbed Chekhov’s absurdist, comic exuberance creating a definitive somewhat po-faced, house style.

More recently, commentators have argued that Chekhov is actually …

Murray Bramwell talks with director Geoffrey Rush and actors Paul Blackwell and Tony Taylor about The Popular Mechanicals, which opens for funny business in the Playhouse tonight.

They have become known as the Rude Mechanicals. They are the artisans led by the redoubtable Peter Quince who perform The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe for the royal court in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Their play is theatrically preposterous, hilarious, endearing and contains some …

King Lear
by William Shakespeare
State Theatre Company
Playhouse

This year the State Theatre Company’s sad tale for winter is King Lear but, unlike the John Gaden/Gale Edwards/Mary Moore production of The Winter’s Tale last year, in Lear the considerable talents of the team seem more at odds than in unison.

Mary Moore’s sooty cavernous set, with inky wash backdrop and a huge obsidian dish which splits open amidst Les Gilbert’s terra-crunching soundtrack, portends a dark purpose for a production …