I Hate Mime
Chris Willems
Price Theatre
Chris Willems says he hates mime but nothing could be further from the truth. What he hates is the fact that white mime has become so refined that it has lost all its nutrients.
I Hate Mime is Willems’ third solo show and it follows Son of Romeo, his highly successful lip readers’ digest of Romeo and Juliet. Though unlike Romeo, with its familiar narrative, Willems’ new work is a more …
Continue Reading Back to topCome Out
The Come Out Festival started in 1974 because many professionals in the arts and education were peeved that the Adelaide Festival was taking no notice of young people in the performing arts. They set up in various parks in inner Adelaide and the momentum began. It was then decided that Come Out would utilise the Adelaide Festival’s administrative resources in the “off” year between Festivals and plan a full-scale programme of the kind that has been offered now …
Continue Reading Back to topSimply Red
Billy Bragg
Le Rox
Billy Bragg is the busker who turned busker. He used to wander the streets performing with a fifty quid electric guitar and a 60 watt amp on his back. Now he tours the world and performs at Le Rox with a fifty quid guitar and his 60 watt amp on the ground. There is much to be pleased about with Billy Bragg. At a time when record production takes an expensive month of Sundays …
Continue Reading Back to topMuch Ado About Nothing
by William Shakespeare
State Theatre Company.
The Playhouse
In setting events in the Messina of 1890, directors John Gaden and Gale Edwards have made their production of Much Ado About Nothing both impetuously Sicilian and priggishly Victorian; thus recognising the volatility and harshness of Shakespeare’s comedy.
The play is a tangle of slander, spite and cant as Hero, daughter of Leonato, is dishonoured by accusations of infidelity and then spurned in high dudgeon by her gullible …
Continue Reading Back to topThe Eurythmics
Memorial Drive
Last time the Eurythmics were in Australia they were Tourists. The
Tourists, it must be said, were never much chop. One of their singles scraped into the Top Ten but no one would have thought that Gorbals rocker, Dave Stewart, and the singer in the Mary Quant tat, Annie Lennox, would do more than sink without trace when the band dispersed in 1980.
Instead, with five hit albums in a row, the Eurythmics are here again …
Continue Reading Back to topA long-term dream will come true for John Gaden when the State Theatre Company’s Much Ado About Nothing opens at the Playhouse tonight. Gaden – and actors William Zappa and Celia de Burgh explain the attraction of the Shakespearean comedy to Murray Bramwell
It was November last year when John Gaden first asked William Zappa whether he knew Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and whether he would be interested in playing Benedick. Zappa recalls:
“I’d been staying with a friend …
Continue Reading Back to topWild Honey, State Theatre Company
Those Dear Departed, Stage Company
Stitch in Time, Vitalstatistix
Bazaar and Rummage, Red Shed Company
The State Theatre Company’s final production for 1987 is Michael Frayn’s adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Wild Honey, directed by Aubrey Mellor. The ur-manuscript of Wild Honey aka Platonov aka A Country Scandal languished in a bank deposit box in Moscow until 1920 before being dusted off and whipped into various shapes by various translators.
Frayn has taken bold …
Continue Reading Back to topPrize Pumpkins
An Inflection of Silence and Other Poems
Edited by Christopher Pollnitz
University of Newcastle Press
The viewless wings of poesy were never anybody’s idea of the way to make money. The rewards for writing poetry must certainly be in heaven because they are mighty scarce on earth. Writers may get grants and free board and lodging in universities from time to time but that is about the size of it.
So when poetry prizes are offered worth several …
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