Magpie2 opens at Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide with the double header Future Tense, directed by Benedict Andrews.

Murray Bramwell

Magpie has returned. It now has a series number -like a software package, or an engine. Magpie2. Reconfigured by former State Theatre Company Executive Producer, Chris Westwood, the company has set aside its theatre in schools charter to provide theatre works with the eighteen to twenty-six year old constituency in mind. It is a big move and there are no guarantees. …

Fast Editing
Simone Clifford
The Space
Adelaide Festival Centre

Murray Bramwell

Adelaide based Simone Clifford’s current program of work, Fast Editing , is part of the Festival Centre Trust’s Made to Move season. Formerly a dancer with ADT during Jonathan Taylor’s artistic directorship in the early Eighties, Clifford went on to work in Jiri Kylian’s Nederlands Dans Theater for five years.

Fast Editing consists of two works- a new piece entitled Reluctant Relics , created in October and November of …

Future Tense
Magpie 2
Queen’s Theatre
Adelaide

The Magpie has landed. Magpie 2, that is. For a long time the theatre-in-education wing of the State Theatre Company, it is has now pitched its energies towards the eighteen to twenty-six age group, not exactly a theatre-friendly demographic. Not exactly a demographic at all. So, newly appointed artistic director Benedict Andrews has nailed his doubloon to the mast with a program to his own liking – a double feature of contemporary European …

(Uncle) Vanya
by Howard Barker

Brink Productions
Red Shed

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Howard Barker’s version of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya is not so much deconstruction as detonation. He has taken one of the great plays of the modern era and turned it into intertextual terrorism. Not since Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead ( or Barker’s own Women Beware Women) has a play so successfully roosted under the roof of another. But unlike Stoppard’s hit, Barker’s Vanya is no …