The action raced from musical soundscapes to didactic melodramas. From animalistic lycra to a japanese tale of love and ogres. Whilst Tiananmen Square rubbed shoulders with a local paper mill, Murray Bramwell was getting to know the nature of the beast itself.
Now that Come Out has gone back inside for another two year period of planning and preparation, it is a good time to take stock. This has been the ninth festival and with its theme, Designing Our Future. …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
Florence Who?
by Roxxy Bent
Junction Theatre
Red Like the Devil
by Teresa Crea
Doppio Teatro
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Now in their new possie in Thebarton, Junction Theatre continue their Art and Working Life series with Florence Who? by Adelaide writer Roxxy Bent. Commissioned by the Australian Nursing Federation, the play takes a lively look at the practices and politics of a profession often distorted by stereotype. Roxxy Bent, widely-regarded for her quirky writing for Vitalstatistix, noted that …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
A Common Prayer
Leunig
Collins Dove
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
For the past twenty years Michael Leunig has turned wisps and smudges of paint and ink into sublime visual comedy. His Franciscan bestiary of parrots, foxes, cats, small dogs and ducks have been ubiquitous since the days of the Nation Review and latterly as spirits of The Age. These creatures have followed stars in billycarts and given solace to the downcast humanity who mope and muse and wonder …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
Happy Days
by Samuel Beckett
State Theatre Company
Playhouse., July, 1991
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
“What’s the idea ? he says -stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground- What does it mean? he says -What’s it meant to mean ?” Playfully self-referential, Samuel Beckett pre-empts the familiar response to his work. What is he trying to say ? What do his plays represent ? His patient reply was always that his plays mean what they are, if …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
A Common Prayer
Leunig
Collins Dove
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
For the past twenty years Michael Leunig has turned wisps and smudges of paint and ink into sublime visual comedy. His Franciscan bestiary of parrots, foxes, cats, small dogs and ducks have been ubiquitous since the days of the Nation Review and latterly as spirits of The Age. These creatures have followed stars in billycarts and given solace to the downcast humanity who mope and muse and wonder in …
Continue Reading Back to top1992
From Wanted For Questioning: Interviews with Australian Comic Artists
(Editors) Murray Bramwell and David Matthews, Allen and Unwin, 1992.
Michael Leunig
One of the first things I discovered when I came to AusÂtralia in 1972 was an extraordinary paper called the Nation Review. Toey, opinionated, snide, courageous, it was a paper with highly distinctive styles and personalities and it had cartoons in it like none I’d seen before. Not like those in Punch or Private Eye or The New …
Continue Reading Back to top1992
From Wanted For Questioning: Interviews with Australian Comic Artists
(Editors) Murray Bramwell and David Matthews, Allen and Unwin, 1992.
John Clarke
John Clarke had already had a whole career before he arrived in Australia in 1977. In New Zealand he achieved the kind of national prominence that Paul Hogan achieved in this country. Enjoying equal success in television, radio and live performance, Clarke and his alter ego, Fred Dagg, almost single-handedly created new comedy in New Zealand. Humorists like …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
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 …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
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. …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
Spring Awakening
by Frank Wedekind
State Theatre Company
Playhouse, April, 1990.
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
It is almost one hundred years to the day since Spring Awakening was written. It’s author was twenty-six at the time and he was writing as no-one had ever done before about sexual and social development in adolescence. Benjamin Franklin (Frank) Wedekind was conceived in San Francisco, raised in Switzerland, and, in defiance of his cranky, autocratic, marxist father, was to become an altogether …
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