murraybramwell.com

November 01, 1990

Sweet Revenge

1990

No Sugar

by Jack Davis

Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney and

Western Australian Theatre Company

Tandanya Theatre, October 1990.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

No Sugar is Jack Davis’ third play. After Kullark in 1978 and The Dreamers four years later, he was commissioned by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust in 1984 to write two plays. That must be some of the best grant money ever spent. The results were Honey Spot, a splendid play for young people which  premiered …

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October 13, 1990

Taking a Warm Approach to a Hot Issue

Filed under: Archive,Interviews

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 …

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Taking a Warm Approach to a Hot Issue

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 …

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October 01, 1990

Unhappy Wanderings

1990

Capricornia

by Xavier Herbert

Adapted for the stage by Louis Nowra

State Theatre Company

Playhouse, September, 1990

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

In his 1938 saga, Xavier Herbert used Capricornia as the name for Australia’s Top End. But it is not just a fictional geography , it is also a mythic one. In a profusion of storylines the novel tells how the half-caste Nawnim/ Norman Shillingsworth seeks identity not in two worlds but in three. On the brink of Asia, …

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One of a Kind

Filed under: Archive,Comedy

1990

An Evening With

Peter Ustinov

Festival Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Peter Ustinov may not quite be a polymath but he’ll do until one comes along. His accomplishments are extraordinary. In addition to his work as an actor he has distinguished himself as a director in theatre and opera , as a playwright, travel writer and autobiographer. He can  speak a dozen languages and has been honoured with Academy Awards, Emmys, Grammys, a chaise in the French Academy and, …

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September 08, 1990

Journeying to Capricornia

Filed under: Archive,Interviews

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 …

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September 07, 1990

An Imaginary Life

Filed under: Archive,Interviews

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 …

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An Imaginary Life

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 …

Continue Reading Back to top

September 01, 1990

Black Pastoral

Restoration
By Edward Bond

State Theatre Company
Playhouse

“I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners. Violence shapes and obsesses our society.” Edward Bond’s plays have reiterated this theme from the first. But for him violence is not innate, some kind of blight in the DNA; it is the consequence of social structures and symptomatic of class-based injustice. That is what Saved is about, and his powerful re-telling of Shakespeare’s Lear.

It is also the …

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Frames

1990

Murray Bramwell

Frames, the Media Resource Centre’s Festival of Film and Video, opens on September 7 and runs for the week through to September 14. Screenings wil be held at Hindley Cinema 3 and the Lion Theatre on North Terrace.

With 130 films programmed in just seven days it promises to be not so much a festival as a binge not only for film specialists but for innocent bystanders as well. Frames consists of a selection of international titles, …

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