Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
Stephen K. Amos
“Oxymoron“, Arkaba Hotel Top Room, 23 May 2024 The Arkaba Top Room is perfect for stand-up comedy – sit where you like, and there’s a handy bar. TVC chose a high table where we could enjoy the contents of a bottle of wine, settle in, and enjoy the querulous but funny Stephen K. Amos. With his show, Oxymoron, Amos is not revealing all new material, but who cares. His basic niceness allows him to get away with audience interactions – a young man named “Marcus” was awarded the unfortunate epithet “Mucus.” A lady in the front row regretted wolfing her…
Continue Reading →Angels in America
By Tony Kushner; University of Adelaide Theatre Guild; directed by Hayley Horton – Part 1 (‘The Millennium Approaches’) 2 May 2024; Part 2 (‘Perestroika’) on 3 May 2024 The AIDS epidemic hit New York City the worst (San Francisco came second). It emerged in the early 1980s, primarily in the gay community, and became synonymous therewith, but was in no way actually so localised. Poorly understood initially by medical science, it was first tagged as Kaposi’s Sarcoma (cancerous lesions on skin, lymph nodes, mouth and other organs). Like all plagues, it caused fear, suspicion, mistrust, prejudice and panic. Lives and…
Continue Reading →Traduce the Juice
O.J. Simpson I was in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on 3 October 1995, the day O.J. was acquitted (because no gloves fitted). The predominantly black staff at my hotel celebrated the verdict, high-fiving each other. On the other side of the country, Los Angeles gave both a huge sigh of relief and a squawk of anger and disbelief. Absurdly, the trial had taken on racial connotations because it seems that then, as now, it is impossible to view many awful events through anything other than the prism of race (or gender, although ‘Race beats gender’). And celebrity beats everything. The best…
Continue Reading →Douglas Murray
“Uncomfortable Conversations”, Norwood Town Hall, 21 March 2024 Douglas Murray, well-known pundit and author (The Madness of Crowds, The War on the West, The Strange Death of Europe), appeared in conversation with Josh Szeps in a wide-ranging exchange of sometimes provocative, and always entertaining, common sense ideas and propositions (Hallelujah! – Ed.). TVC ground staff (in our main image flanking Mr. Murray) attending the talk in Adelaide, were disappointed to confirm that Adelaide maintains its reputation for the polite allowance of discourse. No aggro here, alas – we’d been hoping for the kind of protest and cancelling tactics attempted in…
Continue Reading →The Threepenny Opera
(Die Dreigroschenoper) Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, 10 March 2024 It might not be opera, more cabaret Singspiel, but it was still pretty good. Brecht’s rosy worldview, his ‘Berlinized’ take on John Gay’s balladic Beggar’s Opera, was presented with great élan and sophistication under the direction of TVC’s bête noire, Barrie Kosky, with a subtly simple staging of moving Jungle-Jims, up and over which the cast nimbly climbed and clambered, and a cabaret-style spangly curtain through which heads, and sometimes feet, would peep. Brecht’s libretto is extremely witty but it isn’t really a Marxist social satire, rather a nihilistic view of…
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