Robert Forster
Governor Hindmarsh
August 6.
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
At the first show of a three week tour which was eventually to meander back to Sydney, Robert Forster is looking benign and bemused. It is a cold wet Wednesday, the open fire is banked high and the crowd at the Gov is sparse but keen. There is an air of rehearsal to this out of town try-out, Forster’s first gig since the release of his excellent new CD The …
Continue Reading Back to top2008
Adelaide
Theatre
Attempts on Her Life
by Martin Crimp
State Theatre Company of South Australia
The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre.
August 5. Tickets $21.70 – $51.70.
Bookings BASS 131 246
Until August 23.
Pirandello’s famous experimental play was entitled Six Characters in Search of an Author. Perhaps State Theatre Company’s production of Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life could be called Six Actors in Search of a Narrative. The play opens with a succession of recorded telephone messages, all …
Continue Reading Back to top2008
Blue/Orange
by Joe Penhall
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Dunstan Playhouse, July 8.
Beetle Graduation
by Susan Rogers
Brink Productions
The Space, July 19.
The Mistress
by Arnold Wesker
A Solitary Choice
by Sheila Duncan
Holden Street Theatres, July 23.
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
After the lull in proceedings since the Adelaide Festival, theatre has returned with a range of engaging works about alpha doctors, alpha mothers and two women with very little say at all.
Blue/Orange, by …
Continue Reading Back to top2008
Where You From?
Lenny Henry
Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide,
July 2, 2008
Back in Australia for a fifth time round, UK comic Lenny Henry (CBE) is asking audiences where they’re from. And as he mellows towards his fiftieth birthday next month, he is also telling us where he has been. He makes a droll tale of his family migrating from Jamaica to Dudley in the Midlands. Adding a little power point he shows us the Dudley sights from the …
Continue Reading Back to topASSITEJ 2008
Performing Arts Festival for Young People
May 9-18.
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
In only the second time in 43 years, ASSITEJ (French acronym for the International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People) has held its triennial world congress in Australia – and, again, it has chosen Adelaide as host city. Along with some 600 delegates the event gathered artists, teachers, parents and young people – around 2000 in all, plus thousands more school children attending the …
Continue Reading Back to topFemale of the Species
by Joanna Murray-Smith
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Dunstan Playhouse
April 15- until May.
Alone in her bucolic retreat surrounded only by the vocal and methane emissions of livestock, writer Margot Mason has a deadline to meet And unfortunately, the celebrity intellectual, pioneer proponent of women’s rights and author of the international best-seller, The Cerebral Vagina, has a bad case of writer’s block. Everything, it seems, has already happened to her- and even she …
Continue Reading Back to top2008
Murray Bramwell
With the 2008 Adelaide Bank Festival of Arts over for another two years we have time to reflect on what was and, perhaps, what might have been. And despite Peter Sellars’ declaration, in 2002, that the era of the “big safari” festival, with its big game trophy events, is over – interest in the headliners has been as keen as ever. That is hardly surprising because, although Australians travel more than ever, the tyranny of distance is …
Continue Reading Back to top2008
Adelaide Fringe 2008
Comedy
Rove McManus
Thebarton Theatre, Adelaide
March 15.
Melbourne Comedy Festival
Melbourne Town Hall
April 10-12. Tickets $39.90 – $ 44.50.
On stage for Rove McManus’s stand-up gig at the Thebarton Theatre is a giant picture of a goldfish in a bowl. The fish has large Disney eyes and extruding from its tail, in streaming black calligraphy comes Rove’s famous name. It is a joke very much at his own expense and it is a likeable …
Continue Reading Back to topWomadelaide 2008
Botanic Park
March 7 – 9
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Womadelaide this year will be remembered because the weather was seriously hot – and so was the music program. When even the usually green swath of Botanic Park is looking parched and dusty we know that climate change is not just an Al Gore lecture and the current drought is getting very worrying. The temperatures climbed into the forties and day time sessions tested even the young and …
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