1991

The State Theatre production of Beckett’s Happy Days opens in the Playhouse next week. Murray Bramwell talks with director Simon Phillips and actor Ruth Cracknell about the play and its buried meanings.

It is more than forty years since Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot, a play which was so famous that it became synonymous with 20th century theatre. Beckett himself, immortalised by photographers like Jane Bown, became a craggy icon whose very reclusiveness attracted persistent public attention. His …

1991

The English Shakespeare Company spend most of their time travelling. Murray Bramwell talks with Michael Pennington, June Watson and Andrew Jarvis about touring, audiences and their current repertory season of Coriolanus and The Winter’s Tale.

It is something of paradox that because of their colourful, minimalist stagings, tuxedo toffs, punks and mod cons, the English Shakespeare Company are regarded as an experimental group. In fact, on the road since 1986 with The Henrys, and then the epic Wars of …

1992

From Wanted For Questioning: Interviews with Australian Comic Artists

(Editors) Murray Bramwell and David Matthews, Allen and Unwin, 1992.

Barry Humphries

Barry Humphries is a major Australian artist. He is also a connoisseur, a scholar and surely one of the funniest people alive. His burlesque creations define the art and his writings are some of the best in Australian theatre.

It was my good luck that Humphries was in Australia with The Life and Death of Sandy Stone and …

1990

Ratty, Mole and Badger are returning to the Botanic Gardens this week. Murray Bramwell talks with Director Elena Eremin about Park Projects’ new production of The Wind in the Willows.

According to the mythology Glenn Elston hatched the idea for his highly successful outdoor productions of The Wind in the Willows five or six years ago when he was living in London . He had never read Kenneth Grahame’s rodent classic before and after discovering it in the cheerless …

1990

Prophets and Loss
Produced and Directed by Gabrielle Kelly
and Nick Hart-Williams

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Global warming is the kind of subject likely to put a chill around the heart. It is perhaps for that reason that apart from specifically ordained days of lamentation or the usually unhelpful raiment tearing that we find on TV, the environment as a subject does not rate attention. We get the Nostradamus doomwatch stuff or specific details of spills and toxic waste …

1990

Murray Bramwell talks with playwright Michael Doneman about his new work for the Magpie Company – Mango Season, which opens at the Odeon Theatre next week.

Michael Doneman describes himself as a recidivist Queenslander. After ten years working in theatre in Sydney he returned to his Brisbane base firstly to teach and then more recently, to establish Contact, a theatre for young people.

Over the past year Doneman, in cahoots with Darwin’s Corrugated Iron Company, the Two to Five …

1990

The State Theatre Company production of Capricornia opens in the Playhouse tonight. Director, Kingston Anderson talks to Murray Bramwell about the process from novel to stage.

You might say that Kingston Anderson’s professional career has been dominated by a single word -Capricornia. This point is not lost on him either. “Justine Saunders and I have a joke that we will meet in the street when we are eighty and say `When will you be doing Capricornia again?'”

Anderson was …

1990

Screening tonight as part of the Frames Film Festival is An Angel at My Table, based on the autobiography of the writer Janet Frame. Director Jane Campion talks with Murray Bramwell about her newest work.

There is a story the poet James K. Baxter used to tell about Janet Frame – that when she was confined in a mental institution in New Zealand she was persuaded by doctors to consider a leucotomy, a procedure which cuts through nerve fibre …

1990

Murray Bramwell talks with Beatrice Beaucaire, Fredricka Lascelles and John Kilby about Footsbarn Theatre’s latest production, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has its world premiere in Adelaide tonight.

When, in Cornwall in 1971, they first began rehearsing in a barn belonging to an actor named Oliver Foot, the members of Footsbarn Theatre could not have possibly foreseen that they would become perpetual travellers, a theatre community trekking across continents performing to audiences from Darwin to Moscow to Tunis.

Last …

1990

Murray Bramwell talks to Geraldine Turner and Simon Burke, stars of the revival production of Anything Goes, Cole Porter’s hit musical from 1934, which opens its Adelaide season at the Festival Centre tonight.

Cole Porter might well have been a character in any of the more than fifty musicals and movies for which he wrote hit songs. Wealthy, stylish, smart, he embodied the kind of chic that epitomised New York in the ’30s and ’40s. But a crippling horse …