murraybramwell.com

April 14, 1990

Changing Theatre in Changing Times

Filed under: Archive,International,Theatre

1990

Actor and Director, Gavin Richards, currently in Adelaide with the popular comedy show Allo Allo, talks to Murray Bramwell about Alternative Theatre in the UK- where it has been and how it responds to a changed society.

Actors in television often seem to come out of nowhere, magically discovered and hurled into prominence, but this is rarely true. Take Gavin Richards for instance. He is a household name as the amorous Italian Captain in Allo Allo, the old-style Perry …

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March 23, 1990

Kahlo is the Thematic Centrepiece

Filed under: Archive,International,Theatre

1990 Festival
Visual Arts

Festival Exhibitions
Visions, Maps and Dreamings
Frida Kahlo

The visual arts exhibitions have always been a big draw for the Adelaide Festival and this year’s are no exception. There are differences this time, though, which are likely to set patterns for the future. Firstly, the festival organisers themselves have initiated exhibitions and taken care to incorporate themes in the overall programme.

Daniel Thomas, Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, is well pleased with this …

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June 01, 1989

Interpreting the New Dreaming

Filed under: Archive,Australian Texts,Festival,International,Theatre

Interpreting the New Dreaming
Come Out 89 Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Now that the eighth biennial Come Out Festival has come and gone there is time to reflect on what is a quite remarkable youth arts festival. For 16 years Adelaide has hosted a gathering of performers, participants and audiences which has become such a familiar part of the cultural landscape that it is almost taken for granted.

For that reason any commentary on Come Out should begin by praising …

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May 01, 1989

Catch a Falling Spy

Filed under: Archive,Comedy,International

James Bond
Cliffhanger
The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre.

Britain’s Cliffhanger Theatre Company’s ]ames Bond may not be everybody’s idea of a universal export but will tickle those who like their comedy somewhere between the Goodies and the Spanish Inquisition. Although, unlike the more pugnacious forms of manic English humour, James Bond is low-key, whimsical and gets curiouser and curiouser.

The four Cliffhangers give Ian Fleming’s imperturbable Bond a right old filleting. Pete McCarthy has the familiar tux and grooming but …

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December 01, 1988

Strindberg’s Flickering Tale

Filed under: Archive,International,State Theatre Company,Theatre

By the time this goes to print, August Strindberg’s A Dream Play, the State Theatre Company’s final production of the 1988 season will have opened in the Playhouse. The project began when John Gaden took a shine to the Australian Opera production of The Magic Flute and invited Swedish director Goran Jarvefelt and his collaborator Carl Friedrich Oberle to direct a theatre work for State. Part of the national “World to Australia” program, the production has received Bicentennial dollars, …

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November 01, 1988

Crowning Achievement

Filed under: Archive,International,Theatre

The Wars of The Roses
History Plays by William Shakespeare
English Shakespeare Company
Directed by Michael Bogdanov
Festival Theatre

“And if you crown him, let me prophesy/ The blood of English shall manure the ground/ And future ages groan for this foul act.” The words of the Bishop of Carlisle went unheeded and the rest is history – Shakespeare’s history of a decimating brawl which began in 1398, when the hollow crown of the last Plantagenet Richard II was snatched …

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March 01, 1988

Day for Night

Filed under: Archive,Festival,International,Theatre

The Mahabharata
Adapted by Jean-Claude Carriere
Directed by Peter Brook
Anstey’s Hill Quarry

The Mahabharata is a colossal work. Written in Sanskrit, the first versions date back 400 hundred years BC. Then, for nearly eight centuries this epic poem grew to more than one hundred thousand stanzas. Fifteen times longer than The Bible, it is like the Old and New Testaments, all of Homer and thirty years of Mandrake and the Phantom all rolled into one.

Peter Brook and playwright …

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February 01, 1988

Brook Review

Filed under: Archive,Books,International,Theatre

The Shifting Point: Theatre, Film, Opera 1946-1987
By Peter Brook
Harper and Row

Peter Brook – A Theatrical Casebook
Compiled by David Williams
Methuen

Peter Brook is not only one of the great innovators of Post-war Western theatre he is also one of its most lucid explainers. His first book, The Empty Space, published twenty years ago, reads as freshly and sharply today as it did when Brook first delivered the four Granada Northern lectures on which the …

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November 01, 1987

Acting Funny

Filed under: Archive,Comedy,International,Theatre

Acting Funny
Rowan Atkinson
Opera Theatre.

It is often said that what makes comedy tick is timing. And Rowan Atkinson is expert at it. His performance is rehearsed down to the last pucker, the lines scan like iambic pentameters and it all works like a charm.

As part of the highly successful Not The Nine O’Clock News team, Atkinson’s comedy was distinctively visual and oddly endearing. He can, and has, sparred in more savage comic arenas with the pugnacious Mel …

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May 01, 1987

Song For the Navigator

Filed under: Archive,International,Theatre

Song For the Navigator
by Michael Cowell
Honolulu Theatre for Youth
Directed by John Kauffman
Set Design: Joseph Dodd
Costume Design: Laura Crow
Lighting: Lloyd S. Riford III

Amongst a mixed bag of Australian productions at the ASSITEJ Congress, the Honolulu Theatre for Youth’s play is a likeable piece but not one to put fear in the hearts of local theatre practitioners. Song For the Navigator by Michael Cowell was commissioned by the HTY, as they describe it, “to celebrate …

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