2008

Murray Bramwell talks with Japanese-Australian photographer Mayu Kanamori about the 2008 OzAsia Festival event, CHIKA, a multi-dimensional performance work about the ten year imprisonment of Japanese tourist, Chika Honda.

When she first heard of the arrest in Australia in 1992, for alleged heroin smuggling, of Japanese tourist, Chika Honda, media artist and photographer Mayu Kanamori gave it only passing consideration. “I thought: they’ve arrested a group of mafia types, how embarrassing –they’re Japanese.”

Gradually though, spurred by investigative journalists …

2008

Where You From?
Lenny Henry
Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide,
July 2, 2008

Back in Australia for a fifth time round, UK comic Lenny Henry (CBE) is asking audiences where they’re from. And as he mellows towards his fiftieth birthday next month, he is also telling us where he has been. He makes a droll tale of his family migrating from Jamaica to Dudley in the Midlands. Adding a little power point he shows us the Dudley sights from the …

ASSITEJ 2008
Performing Arts Festival for Young People
May 9-18.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

In only the second time in 43 years, ASSITEJ (French acronym for the International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People) has held its triennial world congress in Australia – and, again, it has chosen Adelaide as host city. Along with some 600 delegates the event gathered artists, teachers, parents and young people – around 2000 in all, plus thousands more school children attending the …

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
by Tennessee Williams
Schaubuhne am Lehniner Platz Berlin
Her Majesty’s, Adelaide. March 11.
Until 16 March.

Since one of the highlights of Brett Sheehy’s 2006 Adelaide Festival was Nora, the theatrically inventive re-framing of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House by Berlin’s Schaubuhne Theatre, the company’s scheduled return this year with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof has created high expectations and a great opportunity for festival audiences not only to renew the connection with director …

2007

Sizwe Banzi is Dead
by Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona
French adaptation by Marie-Helene Estienne

The CICT/Theatre des Bouffes du Nord
The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre
November 7. 2007.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Some productions create great expectations and there can be few greater than for director Peter Brook. His work has the status of legend in this city – especially for those who rate such productions as The Conference of the Birds, The Mahabharata and the …

2007
Murray Bramwell previews the current production of a South African drama classic directed by theatre legend Peter Brook.

Siswe Banzi is Dead opens at the Space on November 7 but it is not for the first time in Adelaide. Athol Fugard’s play, written in collaboration with actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, was scheduled, along with its companion work The Island, at the 1976 Adelaide Festival. The two plays with their vivid and disturbing accounts of life in South …

China
By William Yang
Space Theatre
Adelaide Festival Centre
September 26.

The Eyes of Marege
By Julie Janson
Australian Performance Exchange
And Teater Kita Makassar
Dunstan Playhouse
Adelaide Festival Centre
September 27.

To look from Arnhem Land, across the horizon of the Timor Sea towards Sulawesi, is to see with the Eyes of Marege. For four hundred years the Yolngu people traded and intermarried with the Makassan fishermen and mariners from Indonesia – until 1904, when all dealings were terminated …

2007

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Yohangza Theatre Company, South Korea.
Dunstan Playhouse.
February 1. 2007

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

It is a credit to Douglas Gautier’s plan to revive the program in the Festival Centre that he has brought this sprightly – and spritely – adaptation so auspiciously early. It is smart to link with the Sydney Festival and get the benefit of their line-up – may there be more of it. And, in selecting this skilful Korean company and …

2006

Bash

by Neil Labute

Directors’ Choice Season

Holden Street Theatres

Until 16 September.

The Woman in Black

Adapted by Stephen Mallatratt from the novel by Susan Hill

Her Majesty’s.

Until 9 September.

Murray Bramwell

American playwright Neil Labute has called them latterday plays, but the characters in Bash, his triple bill of one-act pieces, are anything but latter day saints. Raised in Utah as a Mormon himself, Labute draws on these experiences to represent the everyday quality of …

Shakespeare’s Villains
Steven Berkoff
Festival Theatre, February 16.

Murray Bramwell

In the polite world of English theatre Steven Berkoff has always been the bad boy, and, even at sixty eight, he is still a bit of a lad. We owe much to him – for the turbulent rough magic of East, for the curdled wit of his play Decadence, for the outrageousness of his Salome and the camp guignol he has brought to a posse of Hollywood baddies. But this …