1998
Neil Finn
Thebarton Theatre
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Split Enz was a highly accomplished cubist band with wonky costumes and a repertoire of angular, elliptical songs when lead singer Tim Finn sent back to Te Awamutu for his younger brother. Enter Kid Eager. Neil Finn. With the sublime melody and harmonies ofI Got You, he showed Split Enz their true colours and propelled them into the Top Ten.
And Neil Finn just kept on going. After the Enz; …
Continue Reading Back to topOn Top of the World
Europe
by Michael Gow
Melbourne Theatre Company
The Space
After a whistlestop tour of regional centres from Wagga and Launceston to Griffith and Russell Street, the MTC production of Europe has set up for what deserves to be a successful season in the Space.
For one thing, it is a good play and a keen reminder that Michael Gow deserves being made a fuss of. It is also a play that says more about history …
Continue Reading Back to top1998
Macbeth
William Shakespeare
State Theatre
Space
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
The last time we saw Shakespeare performed in the Space was Neil Armfield’s Belvoir Company B repertory season of Hamlet and The Tempest. It was excellent chamber work which used the venue to great advantage. So it was a very great pity when Richard Roxburgh, playing Hamlet, did his cruciate on the second night, forcing the cancellation of an exemplary production.
The contrast with State Theatre’s ill-judged Macbeth…
Continue Reading Back to top1998
My Vicious Angel
Christine Evans
Vitalstatistix
Waterside
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
With its charter as a National Women’s Theatre, Vitalstatistix has set itself a large task. But with Christine Evans’ new play My Vicious Angel the claim has taken tangible form. This fine work has been brought to life- given wings, as the playwright puts it- by an able cast and production team.
Imogen Thomas has created a simple, and portable, set consisting of a vertical steel climbing frame …
Continue Reading Back to top1998
East of Eden
John Steinbeck
adapted by Rob Croser
Independent Theatre
Playhouse
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Independent Theatre has had a continuing relationship with the works of John Steinbeck for a while now. Several years ago the company presented Frank Galati’s stage adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath and now, with the benediction of Elaine Steinbeck, the writer’s widow, director Rob Croser has taken East of Eden and staged it in the Playhouse.
It is a hugely ambitious project …
Continue Reading Back to top1998
Up the Road
John Harding
Company B Belvoir/Playbox
Space
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
It is very rarely that we go to the theatre and experience the immediacy of issues of the day. But that is what it was like to see Company B Belvoir’s production of John Harding’s Up the Road just three days after the Queensland election. Not that the play has been contrived for relevance or, even, that anyone could have predicted, when it was listed for …
Continue Reading Back to topMaster Class
by Terrence McNally
State Theatre South Australia/Adelaide Festival Centre
Optima Playhouse
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Master Class is New York-based playwright, Terrence McNally’s account of sessions Maria Callas held at the Juilliard School of Music between October 1971 and March 1972. These classes, as Rodney Fisher’s informative program notes remind us, took place at a difficult time for La Divina. Her career was, by this time – like her voice – if not in shreds, at least in …
Continue Reading Back to topThe Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
by Thomas Lynch
Jonathan Cape
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
The first I heard of Thomas Lynch was an essay in The London Review of Books entitled Embalming Father. A friend passed it on to me- on an A3 photocopy. Then he found more, and before long I had a file of Lynch works; wise, lugubrious essays written by a poet who also happened to be a funeral director. Essays, among other things, …
Continue Reading Back to topAdelaide Festival
The Dragon’s Trilogy
Theatre Repere de Quebec
Directed by Robert Lepage
Design and Couture : Jean-Francais and Gilles Dube
Music: Robert Caux
Thebarton Theatre .
March 1988.
Every now and then a production appears which is so imaginative that it makes everything else look like radio with mime. Such a play is Theatre Repere of Quebec’s The Dragon’s Trilogy, a Canadian work which was presented in the last week of the Adelaide Festival and inexplicably has been …
Continue Reading Back to top1998
Arlo Guthrie
Norwood Concert Hall
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
You can get anything you want- at Alice’s Restaurant. Just walk right in. It’s around the back, just half a mile from the railway track. When I first read, in1967, in Sing Out, the folkie equivalent of Burke’s Peerage, that Arlo Guthrie, the son of the legendary Woody Guthrie, had just created a sensation at the Newport Folk Festival with a twenty minute song called Alice’s Restaurant, I …
Continue Reading Back to top