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March 15, 2025

Cat Power

Adelaide Festival

Music Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert

The acclaimed Cat Power and a set of songs unparalleled in almost sixty years. What could be better? Unfortunately, among many musical highpoints, there are lows and hesitations, leaving both singer and audience frequently on edge.

Written by Murray Bramwell

If you want to hear Bob Dylan at his best, there couldn’t be a better setlist than the Royal Albert Hall concert in 1966. Never mind that …

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March 10, 2025

Complete Works: Table Top Shakespeare

Adelaide Festival Theatre

Coriolanus, King John, Much Ado About Nothing

This complete rendering of Shakespeare, without actors and speeches, but instead storytellers with a cast of performers from the kitchen cupboard, not only intrigues us but shows us how an audience works.

Written by Murray Bramwell

Led by Tim Etchells, for 41 years the wryly-named Forced Entertainment company from Sheffield UK have made it their business to question and re-frame the business of theatre. Where other companies strive to replicate …

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March 05, 2025

Adelaide Festival: Camille O’Sullivan’s Loveletter

Adelaide Festival: Music

Camille O’Sullivan’s Loveletter is an Irish toast to absent friends. Singers Sinead O’Connor and Shane MacGowan, along with David Bowie, are both mourned, and splendidly celebrated, in this mercurial musical tribute .

Written by Murray Bramwell

Arriving on stage in a flurry of waves, curtsies and glittery smiles, Camille O’Sullivan, from County Cork, surveys the audience at Her Majesty’s with a flustered exuberance. She moves straight into a snippet of “Summer in Siam”, a perky ditty by …

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March 01, 2025

Adelaide Festival: Theatre Krapp’s Last Tape

In a meticulously staged production of a Samuel Beckett classic, Irish actor Stephen Rea gives a touchingly human account of a man in old age slowly revisiting and rewinding a life of disenchantment and missed opportunities.

Written by Murray Bramwell

“A country road. A tree. Evening.” In 1949, Samuel Beckett transformed the post-war theatre with a single play –Waiting for Godot. Clearing the decks of stage naturalism and psychologically detailed characters, he opted for theatrical minimalism. Less was …

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February 26, 2025

Adelaide Festival: Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Text by John Cameron Mitchell

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Trask

The Queens Theatre, Adelaide.

February 26, 2025

Murray Bramwell

Since we are talking about a punk rock musical, why not start with Plato’s Symposium ?

“Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature. Each of us, then, is a ‘matching …

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Preview Interview: WOMADelaide 2025

Adelaide Festival

Music

Preview Interview WOMADelaide 2025

Now one of Australia’s most durable outdoor festivals, WOMADelaide prepares for another four day event featuring music and performances that are, you might say, out of this World. Associate Director, Annette Tripodi talks about the line-up for 2025.

Written by Murray Bramwell

WOMADelaide, with its rather odd portmanteau name, has become a very familiar fixture in Botanic Park in the second weekend in March. This year will be its 28th iteration and …

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February 20, 2025

Fringe: Why I Stuck a Flare Up My Ar** For England

Adelaide Fringe

Theatre: Why I Stuck a Flare Up My Ar** For England

In a frenetic, perceptive, often brilliant sixty minutes, writer and performer Alex Hill explores the agonies, ecstasies and desperate endgames of a London football fanatic.

Written by Murray Bramwell

Bursting into the confines of the Holden Street Studio comes Billy. Amped up, dressed in his national team’s strip, he is ready for battle – for England, St George, and Harry Maguire. So ready, in fact, that in …

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Fringe: Shellshocked

Adelaide Fringe

Theatre: Shellshocked

This excellent new English play from the Edinburgh Fringe, written and directed by Philip Stokes and featuring his son Jack Stokes, is an intriguing and disconcerting meeting of damaged minds.

Written by Murray Bramwell

The scene is an artist’s studio. There is a large blank easel in the centre of the stage with paint-spattered tarps suspended behind it. There is a desk with drawers and, beside a well-used drinks cabinet, stands a disheveled man – bearded, …

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Fringe: Dear Diary

Adelaide Fringe

Theatre: Dear Diary

A diary from a younger self is explored and reinterpreted in storytelling and song. It is a vivid portrait of the artist as a young woman.

Written by Murray Bramwell

“My name is Kay (says Kay Proudlove) and I want to tell you a story.” And it is a beguiling, pensive and candid one. Dear Diary is a history -or rather, a herstory – based on a relic from the turn of the century, her …

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February 12, 2025

Theatre: Housework

In Housework, a droll new play from State Theatre Company, we are invited behind closed Parliamentary doors to glimpse the best that is aspired to – and, funnily enough, quite a bit that falls well short.

Written by Murray Bramwell

In a recent interview Emily Steel describes her wittily-named parliamentary drama, Housework – “I guess what this play is about is who is getting into these positions of power ? What does it cost them ? How much should …

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