1998

Magpie 2 – A Future or a Blown Youth ?

Murray Bramwell

Adelaide

It was only in July last year that I reported in these columns the arrival of a new funded company in Adelaide. Well, it was not so much a new company as a makeover of an existing operation. In an effort to rescue the long-term subscriber base for State Theatre, then Executive Director Chris Westwood grasped the nettle and changed the charter for Magpie, the young …

Theatre/Dance
Adelaide

Barossa Seulle

Meryl Tankard’s Australian Dance Theatre prepares a new work for the Barossa Music Festival.

It is mid-morning on a Wednesday and Meryl Tankard steps out of rehearsal to talk about Seulle, a new work being developed especially for the Barossa Music Festival. Dressed in black leotard, she towels her thick, dark hair and makes a beeline to the spring water dispenser for a cupful.

These Barossa gigs are particular labours of love for Tankard and her …

1997

Rules of Thumb

by Daniel Keene and Alison Croggan

Red Shed Company

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The Red Shed’s association with Melbourne playwright Daniel Keene has been hugely productive. Collaboration in the best sense, it has created a trust between playwright and directors, designers and actors which has resulted in a series of successful commissions. All Souls was first, then award-winner, Because You Are Mine and last year, the film noir-ish spine-chiller, Terminus.

Rules of Thumb is a …

Quiver
Leigh Warren and Dancers
Norwood Town Hall
Adelaide

Murray Bramwell

Quiver, the new program from Leigh Warren and Dancers is continuing evidence of the company’s invention and excellence. With last year’s return season of Klinghoffer and now, the unveiling of two contrasting works, Shimmer and Swerve, Leigh Warren’s signatures are becomingly increasingly apparent. His work is disciplined, elegant and has the added intensity which music performed live can bring. With Klinghoffer, he borrowed ethereal choruses from John Adams’s opera, …

Magpie2 opens at Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide with the double header Future Tense, directed by Benedict Andrews.

Murray Bramwell

Magpie has returned. It now has a series number -like a software package, or an engine. Magpie2. Reconfigured by former State Theatre Company Executive Producer, Chris Westwood, the company has set aside its theatre in schools charter to provide theatre works with the eighteen to twenty-six year old constituency in mind. It is a big move and there are no guarantees. …

Fast Editing
Simone Clifford
The Space
Adelaide Festival Centre

Murray Bramwell

Adelaide based Simone Clifford’s current program of work, Fast Editing , is part of the Festival Centre Trust’s Made to Move season. Formerly a dancer with ADT during Jonathan Taylor’s artistic directorship in the early Eighties, Clifford went on to work in Jiri Kylian’s Nederlands Dans Theater for five years.

Fast Editing consists of two works- a new piece entitled Reluctant Relics , created in October and November of …

Future Tense
Magpie 2
Queen’s Theatre
Adelaide

The Magpie has landed. Magpie 2, that is. For a long time the theatre-in-education wing of the State Theatre Company, it is has now pitched its energies towards the eighteen to twenty-six age group, not exactly a theatre-friendly demographic. Not exactly a demographic at all. So, newly appointed artistic director Benedict Andrews has nailed his doubloon to the mast with a program to his own liking – a double feature of contemporary European …

(Uncle) Vanya
by Howard Barker

Brink Productions
Red Shed

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Howard Barker’s version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is not so much deconstruction as detonation. He has taken one of the great plays of the modern era and turned it into intertextual terrorism. Not since Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead ( or Barker’s own Women Beware Women) has a play so successfully roosted under the roof of another. But unlike Stoppard’s hit, Barker’s Vanya is no …