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 …