Murray Bramwell reports on Adam Cook’s State Theatre Company program for 2009.
One of the things Adam Cook likes to do is spruik his company and never more so than at the time of the new season’s launch. He is good at it, and he pays attention to detail – the graphics, layout, pics and page size of the brochure and, of course, the signature pea-green stylings and snappy slogans. They are all part of the package. This year’s pitch …
Continue Reading Back to top2008
Ghosts
by Henrik Ibsen
Adaptation by Nicki Bloom
State Theatre Company of South Australia
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre.
October 13, 2008. Tickets: $21.70 – $51.70.
Bookings BASS 131 246
Until October 25.
In a letter, in June 1882, Henrik Ibsen declared – “I had to write Ghosts: I couldn’t stop at A Doll’s House: after Nora, I had to create Mrs Alving.” Ibsen, ever the probing questioner of received opinions, showed us Nora leaving her doll house before …
Continue Reading Back to top2008
Architektin
by Robyn Archer
State Theatre Company
Of South Australia
Dunstan Playhouse
September 2., 2008
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
By any measure, the life and achievements of Margerete Schutte Lihotsky were extraordinary. Born in Vienna at the beginning of one century and living to see the arrival of the next, her life spanned the history of modernism. An architect when women were not visible in the profession she was a notable part of the revolution in building and design …
Continue Reading Back to topAdelaide
OzAsia Festival 2008
Adelaide Festival Centre
September 14-28.
The Tale of Haruk
by Bae Yo Sup
Tuida
The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre
September 17.
Once Upon a Midnight
by Alex Vickery-Howe
Music by Tim Lucas
Kijimuna Festival and Flinders University Drama Centre
The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre
September 24.
Shastriya Syndicate
Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
September 24.
Adelaide’s OzAsia Festival is now in its second year and already showing new signs and directions. Among a number of program …
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Murray Bramwell talks with Japanese-Australian photographer Mayu Kanamori about the 2008 OzAsia Festival event, CHIKA, a multi-dimensional performance work about the ten year imprisonment of Japanese tourist, Chika Honda.
When she first heard of the arrest in Australia in 1992, for alleged heroin smuggling, of Japanese tourist, Chika Honda, media artist and photographer Mayu Kanamori gave it only passing consideration. “I thought: they’ve arrested a group of mafia types, how embarrassing –they’re Japanese.”
Gradually though, spurred by investigative journalists …
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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 …
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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 …
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