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 …
Continue Reading Back to topEssington 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 …
Continue Reading Back to topThe 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 …
Continue Reading Back to topAdelaide’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 …
Continue Reading Back to topIt is 1.30pm on a Saturday afternoon and there is a queue five deep stretching from Union Hall at the University of Adelaide right along the Barr Smith lawn. The crowd is made up of high school students, families with young kids, punks, new romantics, old romantics and persons of the stage all shoving gently but firmly for fear that the tickets will sell out before they get a chance to palm out $5 ($2 concession) for the main event.…
Continue Reading Back to topThe State Theatre Company production of Tom Stoppard’s On the Razzle, directed by Peter King, has opened at the Festival Theatre Playhouse in Adelaide.
Its unscheduled appearance follows a late scratching by the commissioned play The Horizon Papers which, it was announced, will now be held over for the SA Sesquicentenary celebrations next year.
On the Razzle is based on a 19th century Viennese play by Johan Nestroy which was a source also for Thornton Wilder’s The Merchant of Yon…
Continue Reading Back to topThe South Australian State Theatre Company’s latest commission, Muse of Fire, by Nigel Krauth, is currently playing in the Playhouse in Adelaide.
Krauth takes the prologue from Henry V as his text – “O for a muse of fire, that would ascend/ the brightest heaven of invention” – and has written a witty, satiric melodrama based on the exploits of George Trafford, an indefatigable theatre manager whose troupe performs at the Empire Theatre in Sydney in 1910.…
Continue Reading Back to topThe State Theatre Company’s Beautland was commissioned to celebrate the International Year of Youth as part of the Come Out 85 Season in Adelaide.
Of his debut as director this season, State’s artistic director Keith Gallasch writes: “Our aim was to develop with Barry Dickins a play for adults about what it was like to be young in this country and … to recover some of the lost values of childhood, and of the past, that they had surrendered to …
Continue Reading Back to topThey are baying for blood again in Adelaide. It’s not the first time that an artistic director of the State Theatre Company has been under siege from the disgruntled, the disappointed, the envious and the Charlie’s Aunt brigade, but the present minder of the State Theatre Company, Keith Gallasch, is particularly vulnerable.
The trouble is that much of what aggrieved Advertiser theatre critic, Alan Roberts, and Opposition Shadow Minister for the Arts, Murray Hills, have had to say in criticism …
Continue Reading Back to topCorse Humours
Richard III
by William Shakespeare
State Theatre Company
Playhouse
It is the job of theatre to invigorate the classical repertoire and for that reason we must occasionally endure productions as ludicrous as the State Theatre Company of South Australia’s Richard III.
It is difficult to fathom the reason for this particular revival. Richard III at any time presents a problem for production and audiences – haw do we regard the central figure: is he evil incarnate or …
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