Category Archive: THEATRE
Humourless Cats
I saw “Cats”, this lame and leaden piece of kiddie street theatre, at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, in 1995. Incredibly, it’s still running, although probably not on Broadway. The book was done by T. S. Eliot in a juvenile mood, and confirms what we’d hitherto suspected: that Old Tom wasn’t too flash in the humour stakes. The poems are poor. The ‘animation’ is becalmed. The songs are ho-hum (at least Grizabella’s stand-out number, “Memory” is drawn from some of Tom’s good poetry). The feline characters mooning about the body of the theatre are annoying. If Gus, the Theatre…
Continue Reading →Hannah Gadsby
Hannah in 'The NGV Story' (ABC) considers the work of Mueck
(Adelaide Fringe Festival, Garden of Unearthly delights, 28 February 2016) It’s the Fringe and you gotta go to something, unless you’re saving those pennies for the stock car race Adelaide puts on to insinuate that it hosts great races and makes great cars (implications no longer true, if they ever were). The Varnished Culture naturally plumped for Hannah, art historian and well known actress and comic. She tends to steer clear of gynie jokes and deploy real wit, a rather radical departure. She is also excellent in a sweet ABC show, Please Like Me. We lined up (with our pre-paid tickets)…
Continue Reading →King Lear
"Who is it that can tell me who I am?"
(by William Shakespeare, 1606) (Dir. Neil Armfield) (Sydney Theatre Company, January 2, 2016) We offer a link to our favourite theatrical review site, Stage Noise, for the searching and wise verdict of this production (as at November 2015) by Diana Simmonds: Stage Noise review of King Lear We have little with which to disagree and little to add, except for this: Lear, in essence, might not bear proper staging. The individuals must be larger than life, and have real gravitas, so in contemporary terms, you require superstars for 7 of the roles. You need to treat the few jokes not as comedy, not even black comedy, but counter-comedy. The…
Continue Reading →Cry Jailolo
Oz Asia Festival, “Cry Jailolo” (Dunstan Playhouse, Festival Theatre, Adelaide) (24/9/15) Jailolo, part of the Indonesian archipelago, has coughed-up a troupe of seven fit young men who (choreographed by Eko Supriyanto) present a genuinely novel dance sequence based on indigenous tribal myth from North Malaku, with modern overtones of environmental threat to a pristine local environment. Sinuous, mesmerizing, ephemeral and fluid, involving moves that are both new and alien, this is an interpretation that intrigues and engages lovers of dance and agnostics alike. Their unusual motion, use of light and shade, stillness, subtle use of hand and foot for percussion, and sense of space,…
Continue Reading →Theatre of Embarrassment
Brent went home for his guitar (Photo Radio Times)
A very anglo-saxon form of comedy, the Theatre of Embarrassment makes one squirm as well as laugh, and the laugh is often through gritted teeth. It is hard to watch and even harder to believe, yet it unfolds before your very eyes, arch and formal as Kabuki, visceral as a knife-fight in an alleyway. When Norman Gunston asks Warren Beatty if “it’s true Miss Carly Simon wrote that song about you…?…The Impossible Dream…?” or mentions en passant to an interrupting Linda McCartney “It’s funny, you know, you don’t look Japanese,” you are at The Theatre. When Larry and Cheryl David,…
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