Adelaide Fringe
Theatre: Dear Diary
A diary from a younger self is explored and reinterpreted in storytelling and song. It is a vivid portrait of the artist as a young woman.
Written by Murray Bramwell
“My name is Kay (says Kay Proudlove) and I want to tell you a story.” And it is a beguiling, pensive and candid one. Dear Diary is a history -or rather, a herstory – based on a relic from the turn of the century, her …
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Theatre: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic tale about the struggle between public virtue and unconscious impulse is brilliantly transformed for stage and screen.
Written by Murray Bramwell
One of the many happy consequences of ongoing Adelaide Festival programming is that we have the chance to see the development of new work from artists and companies who have performed previously.
So, after last year’s extraordinary work, The Picture of Dorian Gray, …
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Murray Bramwell
Fringe review: Afghanistan is Not Funny
Five Stars
A high-profile comedian visits a war zone in Kabul and it not only transforms him, but the things he wants to write about. This often comic memoir looks for answers to serious questions.
Henry Naylor is the master of the dramatic miniature. His plays, rarely more than sixty minutes in duration, are a crowded hour of fact, polemic, suspense, and compressed emotion that take us where other playwrights …
Continue Reading Back to topA German Life
by Christopher Hampton
Co-produced by Adelaide Festival
and The Gordon Frost Organisation.
Dunstan Playhouse. Adelaide Festival Centre.
February 23. Tickets $ 30 – $109.
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au.
Duration: 1 hour 30 minutes. No interval.
Until March 14.
“I have forgotten such a lot,” concedes Brunhilde Pomsel, aged 102, “And then …things surge up into my mind. Things I can remember in the minutest detail.”
This happens when you get old, but in the case of Pomsel, the sweeping …
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Murray Bramwell
Two friends are cast in a school production of The Comedy of Errors. At Geelong Grammar, no less. One is Greg Fleet, the other Ian Darling. One took the high road, the other the low. Forty years later they ponder where life has taken them – and which road was which.
**** Four Stars
The Twins, we are told, is Truer than Fiction. Terry Serio the director describes it as Theatre Verite. Whatever it is, …
Continue Reading Back to topMurray Bramwell talks with OzAsia Artistic Director, Joseph Mitchell, about some highlights of this year’s program.
The OzAsia festival which opens this Thursday is now in its eleventh year. Initiated in 2006 by Adelaide Festival Centre CEO, Douglas Gautier, it has progressively consolidated its reputation as an adventurous and diverse event. It draws from all parts of the Asian and South East Asian sector – from China and Japan to Hong Kong and Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea to The …
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The Comedy of Errors
by William Shakespeare
State Theatre Company and Bell Shakespeare
Dunstan Playhouse
Adelaide Festival Centre.
July 2. Tickets $ 25 – $ 65
Bookings: BASS 131 246, bass.net.au
Until July 14.
Shakespeare’s comedies are full of tricks, dupes and misunderstandings. His characters frequently use disguise, subterfuge and illusion to create confusion. Appearances are altered to remedy injustice, take revenge and, often, to bring the misguided and the wrongheaded to their senses. But only his first …
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The Comedy of Errors
by William Shakespeare
The Bell Shakespeare Company
Dunstan Playhouse, September, 2004.
Murray Bramwell
It is seven years since Bell Shakespeare last played in Adelaide and they return with a production full of fun and flair. Thought to be Shakespeare’s first play, The Comedy of Errors borrows freely from The Menaechmi by the Roman playwright Plautus, except that, not content with the confusion of one set of twins, Shakespeare goes double or nothing by adding twin …
Continue Reading Back to topThe Beauty Queen of Leenane
by Martin McDonagh
Sydney Theatre Company
with The Druid Theatre and Royal Court
Optima Playhouse
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
There are nearly as many cliches about Ireland as there are people willing to perpetuate them. It’s not just the leprechaun pubs and the soft core music – it’s as though the whole place has become a theme park. James Joyce once said Ireland was the mother that ate her farrow. Nowadays, she’d sell them to …
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