Seagull
Anton Chekhov
Directed by Aubrey Mellor
State Theatre Company
Playhouse.

The question of whether Chekhov’s drama is comic or tragic has become a hoary one. But it is nevertheless important. In not quite a hundred years critical opinion has run from one side of the boat to the other. In his influential Moscow Art Theatre productions, Stanislavsky- systematically curbed Chekhov’s absurdist, comic exuberance creating a definitive somewhat po-faced, house style.

More recently, commentators have argued that Chekhov is actually …

Murray Bramwell talks with director Geoffrey Rush and actors Paul Blackwell and Tony Taylor about The Popular Mechanicals, which opens for funny business in the Playhouse tonight.

They have become known as the Rude Mechanicals. They are the artisans led by the redoubtable Peter Quince who perform The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe for the royal court in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Their play is theatrically preposterous, hilarious, endearing and contains some …

King Lear
by William Shakespeare
State Theatre Company
Playhouse

This year the State Theatre Company’s sad tale for winter is King Lear but, unlike the John Gaden/Gale Edwards/Mary Moore production of The Winter’s Tale last year, in Lear the considerable talents of the team seem more at odds than in unison.

Mary Moore’s sooty cavernous set, with inky wash backdrop and a huge obsidian dish which splits open amidst Les Gilbert’s terra-crunching soundtrack, portends a dark purpose for a production …

Rough Crossing
by Tom Stoppard
State Theatre Company.

Playhouse.

Tom Stoppard is well on the way to becoming a noun. A stoppard could be the kind of play you write while you are waiting to write a play, a mot boiler, probably retreaded from an obscure, Hapsburg whimsy by Nestroy. Or even Ferenc Molnar, whose The Play at the Castle dined on the ‘well-made’ confections of Victorien Sardou and was itself snaffled by P. G. Wodehouse to become The Play’s …

Kitchen Synch
Absurd Person Singular
By Alan Ayckbourn.
State Theatre Company.
Playhouse.

The State Theatre Company chose Absurd Person Singular because, as it was the first time any Alan Ayckbourn had been performed professionally in Adelaide, they wanted to present a proven winner. It is a good piece and epitomises Ayckbourn’s undeniable stagecraft. But in recent years TV audiences have seen this play, Absent Friends, Season’s Greetings and numerous repeats of The Norman Conquests enough for the production to have …