Category Archive: THEATRE
Vale Barry Humphries
(17 February 1934 – 22 April 2023) On Saturday night (22/4/23) TVC went to see the very funny Jimmy Carr. Later on, we saw his tweet: “A bit bittersweet doing gigs in Australia this evening, Barry Humphries has passed and no one will ever be as good at crowd work again.” Whilst something of a polymath, Humphries’ great legacy was established on the boards. His one-man, multi-character work in the theatre is unmatched. Most famous is his Housewife Gigastar, Dame Edna Everage. Caroline Overington, in the Sydney Morning Herald, described Dame Edna as “a perfect parody of a modern, vainglorious…
Continue Reading →Jimmy Carr – Terribly Funny
(Thebarton Theatre, 22 April 2023) For the better part of 2 hours late on Saturday night, comedian Jimmy Carr entertained a packed theatre with his urbane brand of dark, un-PC humour. His promotional statement: “Jimmy’s show contains jokes about all kinds of terrible things. Terrible things that might have affected you or people you know and love. But they’re just jokes – they are not the terrible things.” It takes a certain courage to make jokes about rape, paedophilia, poor parenting, and death, but generally he gets away with it, and he is well onto the next bon mot before…
Continue Reading →Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(By Robert Louis Stevenson; Sydney Theatre Company adaption and direction by Kip Williams: Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, 5 March 2023) Stevenson‘s 1885 fable of the dangers of suppressing the id “is for ever being recalled, throughout the English-speaking world, to signify man’s divided nature.”* Filmed, staged and broadcast hundreds of times, the story is superior to the telling, and in this adaptation (by the team that presented The Picture of Dorian Gray) we are treated to a Gothic glory, vivified for the stage by dark demonic videographers, swarming hornet-like about the players. So it is not quite a two-hander. Stevenson’s…
Continue Reading →Dark Side of Parkside
Walking Tour (Adelaide Fringe Festival, 2 March 2023) Parkside, an old suburb just to the south of the Parklands which encircle the Adelaide CBD, is famous for one of the most well-known of all Adelaide’s infamous homicides – the one known as “the body-in-the-freezer murder”. But, while those of us who knew someone involved in this macabre crime, or who worked in the odd building which housed the freezer, are familiar indeed with the gory details, there are some – particularly people born this century – who must have only a vague notion of the events, if any notion at…
Continue Reading →The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?
(By Edward Albee: Directed by Mitchell Butel – State Theatre Company SA, 21 February 2023) Albee wrote some killer lines in his time. He had a flair for haute psychomania. He also was very clever at combining comedy with drama. Alas, he fell short with The Goat, that descends to farce, and exchanges drama for histrionic displays of temper. Feydeau he wasn’t. It was perfectly watchable the other night. Claudia Karvan, as Stevie, Nathan Page as Martin, and Mark Saturno as Ross, all deliver their overheated lines in an overheated (American) way. Newcomer Yazeed Daher, as son Billy, throws flamboyant tantrums….
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