Ghosts
by Henrik Ibsen
Big Ensemble
Lion Theatre.
Of all Ibsen’s plays, Ghosts is the most scarifying. Its themes are darkly deterministic, its social criticism relentless. Ibsen’s plays spoke not just for his own country but for all of Europe, haunted by the ghosts of dead ideas, old and obsolete beliefs. As his central character, Mrs Alving says – “They are not alive in us but they remain in us none the less, and we can never rid themselves of …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
King Golgrutha
by Stephen Sewell
State Theatre Company
Playhouse, July 1991.
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
What has always distinguished Stephen Sewell is his wish to make theatre do things that most believe it can’t or shouldn’t do. When the collective concentration span is diminishing he writes plays that run till eleven thirty, when it is prudent to be ironic he offers unabashed earnestness. Sewell breaks rules almost as if he doesn’t realise they exist with the consequence that he …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
The State Theatre Company is currently in production with a new Australian play. Murray Bramwell talks with playwright Stephen Sewell about his latest monsterpiece -King Golgrutha.
A newly commissioned play is always an event, a new work from Stephen Sewell even more so. For nearly fifteen years Sewell has created very distinctive theatre- beginning with The Father We Loved on a Beach by the Sea, Traitors and Welcome the Bright World and prominently, with plays premiered by the State …
Continue Reading Back to topThe action raced from musical soundscapes to didactic melodramas. From animalistic lycra to a japanese tale of love and ogres. Whilst Tiananmen Square rubbed shoulders with a local paper mill, Murray Bramwell was getting to know the nature of the beast itself.
Now that Come Out has gone back inside for another two year period of planning and preparation, it is a good time to take stock. This has been the ninth festival and with its theme, Designing Our Future. …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
Florence Who?
by Roxxy Bent
Junction Theatre
Red Like the Devil
by Teresa Crea
Doppio Teatro
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Now in their new possie in Thebarton, Junction Theatre continue their Art and Working Life series with Florence Who? by Adelaide writer Roxxy Bent. Commissioned by the Australian Nursing Federation, the play takes a lively look at the practices and politics of a profession often distorted by stereotype. Roxxy Bent, widely-regarded for her quirky writing for Vitalstatistix, noted that …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
Happy Days
by Samuel Beckett
State Theatre Company
Playhouse., July, 1991
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
“What’s the idea ? he says -stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground- What does it mean? he says -What’s it meant to mean ?” Playfully self-referential, Samuel Beckett pre-empts the familiar response to his work. What is he trying to say ? What do his plays represent ? His patient reply was always that his plays mean what they are, if …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
The State Theatre production of Beckett’s Happy Days opens in the Playhouse next week. Murray Bramwell talks with director Simon Phillips and actor Ruth Cracknell about the play and its buried meanings.
It is more than forty years since Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot, a play which was so famous that it became synonymous with 20th century theatre. Beckett himself, immortalised by photographers like Jane Bown, became a craggy icon whose very reclusiveness attracted persistent public attention. …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
Spring Awakening
by Frank Wedekind
State Theatre Company
Playhouse, April, 1990.
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
It is almost one hundred years to the day since Spring Awakening was written. It’s author was twenty-six at the time and he was writing as no-one had ever done before about sexual and social development in adolescence. Benjamin Franklin (Frank) Wedekind was conceived in San Francisco, raised in Switzerland, and, in defiance of his cranky, autocratic, marxist father, was to become an altogether …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
Spring Awakening
by Frank Wedekind
State Theatre Company
Playhouse, April, 1990.
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
It is almost one hundred years to the day since Spring Awakening was written. It’s author was twenty-six at the time and he was writing as no-one had ever done before about sexual and social development in adolescence. Benjamin Franklin (Frank) Wedekind was conceived in San Francisco, raised in Switzerland, and, in defiance of his cranky, autocratic, marxist father, was to become an altogether …
Continue Reading Back to top1991
The Winter’s Tale
Coriolanus
by William Shakepeare
English Shakespeare Company
Her Majesty’s, March, 1991.
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
The English Shakespeare Company’s The War of the Roses is a hard thirty-five acts to follow – even for the English Shakespeare Company. When they visited Adelaide in 1988 the ESC was concluding a two year tour with their marathon history cycle – Richard II to Richard III with all the Henrys in between. Performed in a five day stint the …
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