Things We Do For Love
By Alan Ayckbourn
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Dunstan Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre.
October 6. Tickets $45 – $60. Bookings BASS 131 246
Until October 17.

While it is the chirpy Seventies tune from 10CC which lends its name to State Theatre’s latest offering, it is another song used in the production – Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart – which equally matches the mood of the play.
The prolific Alan Ayckbourn is …

Murray Bramwell surveys theatre during The Adelaide Review’s quarter century.

With the Adelaide Review celebrating 25 years publication earlier this year it is a good time, in the immortal words of Dame Edna Everage, to look back retrospectively. In 1984 the two strands of theatre in Adelaide – amateur and professional – were , and still are , recognisably evident . The Adelaide Rep was the stalwart it remains, as were the Adelaide University Theatre Guild, Therry,
Matt Byrne Productions, …

The Pyjama Girl
Devised and performed by Ladykillers
Vitalstatistix in association with Adelaide Festival Centre inSpace program.
Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre.
December10. Tickets $18 – $25. Bookings BASS 131 246
Until December 19.

In a week when there has been much discussion about gender representation in Australian theatre, we should remember Adelaide-based company, Vitalstatistix, has marked twenty five years of women doing it for themselves. As part of their current season they have programmed The Pyjama Girl, a new …

Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime
By Joanne Drayton
HarperCollins, $59.99.
ISBN 9781869506353

Murray Bramwell

Whatever it was that impelled Ngaio Marsh, at the age of 36, to purchase six exercise books and a handful of pencils and go back to her cold London flat and begin writing a detective novel, is only one of the many mysteries of her long and remarkable life. Perhaps being born in Christchurch in 1895 on April 23 – St George’s Day, but also …

The Wizard of Oz
By L.Frank Baum
Windmill
Dunstan Playhouse, June 30.

Mnemonic
Conceived by Simon McBurney and Devised by Complicite
State Theatre Company of South Australia
In association with Adelaide Festival Centre’s inSPACE Program
Space Theatre, July 2 .

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Nothing can quite match The Wizard of Oz. Ever since Judy Garland, as Dorothy, was spun from black and white Kansas into the dazzling lolly- coloured world of Oz in the 1939 MGM film version, the …

Murray Bramwell

The Fringe is back and, as someone once said, it’s like a shoebox full of grasshoppers. The program numbers are up again. This time organizers are proclaiming they have broken the 500-shows-listed barrier – with 293 of them Australian premieres. Whatever all those new shows might actually mean. Some will be brilliant and we will tell our friends, some will be just good enough and maybe we won’t. And some will be fascinatingly execrable and linger in the …

The Dumb Waiter
by Harold Pinter
State Theatre Company of South Australia
The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre. May 20.
The 2-Dimensional Life of Her
Devised by Fleur Elise Noble
Queen’s Theatre. May 18.

For the last two weeks an estimated 120,000 young people from across South Australia have been participating in Come Out, the Australian Festival for Young People, which, for 34 years now, has been presenting a biennial array of events and activities in the performing arts and literature. …

Maestro
By Anna Goldsworthy and Peter Goldsworthy
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide.
March 3. Tickets $45 – $60. Bookings BASS 131 246
Until March 11.

“What is the difference between good and great ?” Paul Crabbe, the eager boy pianist from Darwin keeps asking his enigmatic, Viennese trained teacher. “Not much” is his answer – “little bits.” Peter Goldsworthy’s masterful novel Maestro has intrigued readers since it first appeared twenty years ago and now, in …

The Hypochondriac
by Moliere.
Adaptation by Paul Galloway
Brink Productions
Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre.
August 5 . Tickets $24.90 – $42. Bookings BASS 131 246
Until August 22.

Laughter may be the best medicine but in the case of Moliere’s The Hypochondriac, you would have to say that medicine is the best laughter. Also known as The Imaginary Invalid, this pungent comedy, first performed in 1673, takes aim at those quacks, charlatans and medical phonies who, with their potions, …

Janet Frame, Prizes: Selected Short Stories
Vintage, $34.99
ISBN 9781869791131
Witi Ihimaera, His Best Stories,
Raupo, $ 30.00.
ISBN 9780143010906
Owen Marshall (ed), Essential New Zealand Short Stories
Vintage, $40.00.
ISBN 97818697791285

Murray Bramwell

There is something unexpectedly, but suitably, upbeat about the title of this Vintage selection of Janet Frame short stories. Prizes, draws from all four of Frame’s previous collections, but unlike those ominous location titles, The Lagoon and The Reservoir, here we have the glitter of victory …