murraybramwell.com

March 12, 2018

Shakespeare’s war room in theatrical overdrive

Filed under: 2018,Archive,Festival,International,Theatre

Adelaide Festival

Kings of War
by William Shakespeare
Adaptation by Bart Van den Eyde , Peter Van Kraaij.
Translated by Rob Klinkenberg.
Directed by Ivo van Hove.
Toneelgroep Amsterdam.
Festival Theatre, Adelaide
March 10. Tickets $30 -$129.
Bookings : 131 246 or online.
Duration : 4 hours 30 mins (30 min interval)
English surtitles.
Until March 13.

It is four years since Toneelgroep Amsterdam amazed Adelaide Festival audiences with their dazzling Shakespearean triptych Roman Tragedies, a six hour spectacle …

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March 08, 2018

Daily Review – Adelaide Fringe 2018

Filed under: 2018,Archive,Australian Texts,Fringe,Theatre

Adelaide Fringe

Murray Bramwell

That Daring Australian Girl

Written and performed by Joanne Hartstone

Holden Street Theatres

March 6. Until March 18.

Muriel Matters, the Adelaide-born suffragette, her name itself a slogan, was a most remarkable woman. Her progress from Parkside High School and the Music Conservatorium of the University of Adelaide to the performance stages and, even more dramatically, the political arenas of London, is fascinating to follow. Writer and performer, Joanne Hartstone knows this only too well and …

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March 05, 2018

The Far Side of the Moon Theatre Review

Filed under: 2018,Archive,Festival,International,Theatre

Daily Review
Adelaide Festival

Murray Bramwell

Lunar Tunes

The Far Side of the Moon
Written and directed by Robert Lepage
Ex Machina.
Her Majesty’s, Adelaide.
March 3.

It was the Soviet Luna 3 mission in 1959 which first captured photos of the far side of the moon. They discovered mountains and dark regions which the Russians named the Sea of Moscow, the Sea of Desire and the Sea of Ingenuity.

For French Canadian theatre director, Robert Lepage, the far side …

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March 04, 2018

Ambitious staging brings out the dead in bright unbearable reality

Filed under: 2018,Adelaide Companies,Archive,Festival,Theatre

Adelaide Festival

Memorial
by Alice Oswald
Brink Productions
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre.
March 2. Tickets $30 – $79.
Bookings 131 246 or online.
Duration: 90 minutes (no interval)
Until March 6.

Alice Oswald’s long poem, Memorial, published in 2011, is well-named. It is elegiac and unforgettable. She calls it an “excavation” and “a kind of oral cemetery.” It is a list of 215 names, taken from Homer’s Iliad, of soldiers who died in the Trojan War. With clinical …

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March 02, 2018

Grace Notes

Filed under: 2018,Archive,Festival,Music

Grace Jones
Elder Park
Adelaide Festival
February 28

Murray Bramwell

When Grace Jones takes to the stage in Elder Park – an unfashionably fashionable 45 minutes late – it is like the arrival of the Queen of Sheba at the Dia de los Muertes, day of the dead. She is wearing a shiny skull mask haloed with long black spikes and a body suit with thick, white skeletal markings that Keith Haring might have personally designed. But if this …

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Daily Review – Welcoming the World

Filed under: 2018,Archive,Music,Womadelaide

Daily Review

Welcoming the World

As WOMADelaide prepares to open the gates of Botanic Park from March 9 -12, Murray Bramwell talks with Program Manager Annette Tripodi about the 2018 program.

March is a brilliantly mad month in Adelaide. It is when the city is captured by the Festival and Writers’ Week, the ever-expanding Fringe, the Clipsal 500 Supercar race, and WOMADelaide. Each event has its signatures, rituals and durable traditions – but that seems almost especially true of WOMAD.…

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March 01, 2018

Compelling footy drama sinks the slipper into unexamined misogyny

Filed under: 2018,Archive,Australian Texts,Festival,State Theatre Company,Theatre

Adelaide Festival 2018

In the Club
by Patricia Cornelius
State Theatre Company
Odeon Theatre, Norwood Parade, Adelaide.
February 27. Tickets: $34- $76. Bookings 131 246 or adelaidefestival.com.au.
Duration 90 minutes (no interval)
Until March 18.

Commenting on her play Love, written in 2003, the prolific and fearless playwright, Patricia Cornelius observed: “Love is a given. We all believe we will feel it one day. Most of the time it is represented in a rather crass and ludicrous package, but …

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February 18, 2018

Adelaide Fringe 2018

Filed under: 2018,Archive,Fringe,International,Theatre

Theatre

Next Stop Romance as Edinburgh imports cut straight to the heart

Love Letters to the Public Transport System
by Molly Taylor
February 14.
Holden Street Theatres until March 1.

Borders
by Henry Naylor
Gilded Balloon and Redbeard Theatre
February 14.
Holden Street Theatres until March 18.

Fallot
Company 2
February 17.
Empire Theatre, Royal Croquet Club
Until February 25.

Bookings : adelaidefringe.com.au or phone 1300 621 255.
Duration: each show 60 minutes.

The Adelaide Fringe has switched on. With …

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December 14, 2017

The Best of 2017

Filed under: 2017,2018,Archive

“When you hear music,“ jazz saxophonist Eric Dolphy once remarked, “After it’s over, it’s gone, in the air. You can never capture it again.”

In varying degrees that is true of all live performances. They have their moment, their season and then are gone. Sometimes they remain vivid, but eventually, even excellent productions and outstanding performances drift into imperfect recollection and generalised hearsay. Maggie Smith once remarked- “Every performance is a ghost.”

I hope this website, for all its sometimes …

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December 10, 2017

Jewels and Binoculars

Filed under: 2017,Archive,Books

Blood Ties
New and Selected Poems : 1963- 2016
by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
Canterbuy University Press.
167pp. RRP $ 25.
ISBN 978-1-927145-88-3

Dylan Junkie
by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman
Makaro Press Hoopla Series
54 pp. RRP $ 25.
ISBN 978-0-9941378-0-7

It is a harsh fact that we live in a world where there is far more published poetry than people willing or able to read it. Over the past fifty years poetry has ceased to be a common currency. It is …

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