murraybramwell.com

September 01, 1993

Hot Tap

Filed under: Archive,Australian Texts,Interstate,Theatre

Hot Shoe Shuffle
David Atkins Enterprises
Her Majesty’s

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

One of the disappointments about show business at the moment is that almost everything is retro. It is as though we are so lost in a thrall of nostalgia that we have forgotten that when Forty Second Street first appeared in 1933 people walked into the movie theatres and saw images from the streets around them. Similarly, when South Pacific opened in 1949 the war was scarcely over. …

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Paul Kelly and his songs

Filed under: Archive,Interviews,Music

Available as PDF: Paul Kelly and his songs.pdf

Murray Bramwell

Look around you; we’re living in amazing times
They are not so important-your little crimes
‘Keep it to Yourself’

Things sometimes have a habit of going full circle. Take Paul Kelly for instance. In Adelaide, his home town, he began writing in his teens, poetry at first and then prose. For a time in the late 70s he coedited the magazine Another One For Mary. Now he has a book …

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Icon Tactics

Filed under: Archive,Australian Texts,Comedy,Theatre

Look at Me When I’m Talking to You
Barry Humphries
Her Majesty’s

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Edna Everage may want our eye contact but it is her unmistakable voice that greets us first in Look at Me When I’m Talking to You. With bridesmaid Madge providing sign translation on a large video screen Edna gives some guidelines for live theatre. We have not been given remote control units because they will not work- this is not television, the actors on …

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Lost Lives

Filed under: Adelaide Companies,Archive,Australian Texts,Theatre

And I’ll Give You All the Diamonds in My Teeth
by Jeanne Mazure
South Australian Writers’ Theatre
Red Shed

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

By coincidence we have recently had two new plays about the life of the mentally ill. But where Louis Nowra’s Cosi settled for comic exoticism, in And I’ll Give You All the Diamonds in My Teeth, South Australian writer Jeanne Mazure has delved deeper. A practising psychologist herself, Mazure has had a long association with her subject …

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Touching on the Truth

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

Brilliant Lies
by David Williamson
Queensland State Theatre Company
in association with State Theatre Company
Playhouse

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

David Williamson’s recent work has often seemed like a mixture of Ibsen and Ray Cooney. The ethical and social questions in plays like Top Silk and Money and Friends were constantly being short-circuited by broad comedy and one-liners. Complexity, if any developed, was distrusted by the writer. Besides, it might compromise passenger comfort. Much better to give the folks another …

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