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 …
Continue Reading Back to topCouple of Kids
by Julianne O’Brien
Magpie Theatre Company.
May 1989.
Directed by Angela Chaplin
Richard Margetson, Caroline Mignone, Stephen Mitchell,
Brett Wood, Peter Wood.
Magpie’s Angela Chaplin has taken on an ambitious task with her production of Julianne O’Brien’s Couple of Kids. Staged in a former church at Site 55, Port Road Hindmarsh, with an imaginative design by …
Continue Reading Back to top1989
At last the full truth can be told. In a two part programme starting tonight (Saturday, August 26) at 6.30 on ABC Radio National (5CL 729) Prince Belligerent, arguably the least known medieval nonentity since Monty Python’s Sir Notappearinginthisfilm, will be given his historical due.
For reasons which still remain clouded in mystery, the task of presenting Belligerent’s extraordinary story has been entrusted to ABC National’s Comedy Unit in Melbourne. Working from a script by Kevin Nemeth (this is …
Continue Reading Back to top1989
Mistero Bufo
Lenny Kovner
Lion Theatre
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Mistero Bufo, as Lenny Kovner drily informs us, does not translate as Mister Boofhead. The Mysteries are medieval stories taken from the Bible and Apochrypha, as well as from the lives of the saintly , the bold and the not-so-beautiful. Presented in what began as eisteddfods of community theatre, presided over by a watchful clergy, they grew to become travelling popular entertainment on a scale to rival the Church …
Continue Reading Back to top1989
Director Rose Clemente and members of the cast talk with Murray Bramwell about The Heartbreak Kid currently playing at Theatre 62.
It was after presenting Witchplay for the Fringe season at the Lion Theatre last year that Adelaide actors Rose Clemente and Christina Totos decided to plan further ventures. Witchplay, a solo piece, had been performed by Rose and directed by Christina. Now, for The Heartbreak Kid, the roles are reversed. Along with local performers, Ian Dixon, Maurie Annese …
Continue Reading Back to topThe 1989 Come Out festival has ended and yet again this remarkable event has focused activities in all areas of youth arts. The more than fifty events involving .hundreds of performers and audiences of many thousands are only part of a chain reaction of activities generated in schools and communities in the metropolitan area and throughout the state.
In fifteen years Come Out has expanded and consolidated such that it is almost taken for granted locally. It is worth saying …
Continue Reading Back to topJames 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 …
Continue Reading Back to top1989
Selected Poems
Peter Bland
John McIndoe
1987, 79 pp.
Murray Bramwell
I was about fifteen when I first read Peter Bland. By some oversight his first collection, My Side of the Story, had found its way on to the shelves of my high school library. I presumed it be an oversight because nothing about my high school days led me to believe that such a subversive book of poems could ever have been knowingly put there. Here were these …
Continue Reading Back to top1989
DRAFT
My Gorgeous Life
Dame Edna Everage
Macmillan
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Despite having become more global than ozone since her first appearance in 1956 (at the behest of playwright Ray Lawlor), Dame Edna Everage has rarely committed herself in print. Virtually silent on the page since the Coffee Table Book of 1976, her recently released memoir My Gorgeous Life candidly and caringly reveals details that have somehow escaped the tungsten glare of publicity in which she is perpetually …
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Reviewing the Reviewers: Thoughts on the Place of Criticism in the Theatre
1989
Murray Bramwell
To say that theatre reviewing is a strange and sometimes excruciating ritual is hardly a revelation. Yet the reasons for this and the assumptions on which they are based are rarely considered except in times of crisis. Of course, in the theatre that means quite often. The theatre, after all, is a volatile, sometimes giddy creature and much inclined to generating and attracting hyperbole. In fact, theatre is often seen as synonymous with crisis. No other art …
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