murraybramwell.com

December 01, 1996

Making Gravy

Filed under: Archive,Music

Paul Kelly
with Paul Brady
Governor Hindmarsh

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Paul Kelly has played here four times this year and each time he’s been full of surprises. The January gig at Heaven brought a five piece line-up plus a set from the Blackeyed Susans. Then, fresh from the Womad train, he played a full house at Festival Theatre with fabled pedal steel player and national broadcaster, Lucky Oceans. The Norwood Town Hall show featured Renee Geyer, whose fortunes have …

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Cold Comfort

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

The Fire on the Snow
by Douglas Stewart

State Theatre
Playhouse

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

I admit to having some apprehension about this production. The advance publicity suggested eccentricity in the design and the idea of cross-casting struck me as arbitrary. And, having been raised on the boys’ own annuals of the fifties, I wasn’t sure there was much about the legend of Robert Falcon Scott that held any further interest for me either. However, as it happens, I had …

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Chekhov, Too

Filed under: Adelaide Companies,Archive,Theatre

(Uncle) Vanya
by Howard Barker

Brink Productions
Red Shed

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Howard Barker’s version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is not so much deconstruction as detonation. He has taken one of the great plays of the modern era and turned it into intertextual terrorism. Not since Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead ( or Barker’s own Women Beware Women) has a play so successfully roosted under the roof of another. But unlike Stoppard’s hit, Barker’s Vanya is no …

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