Category Archive: THEATRE
All My Sons
[written by Arthur Miller, 1947 – Production at the National Theatre, directed by Ivo van Hove, 2026] All My Sons is more-or-less bulletproof. It has been compared to great Greek tragedy, particularly Oedipus (by the playwright himself, among others), and its power derives principally from the way the plot ambles like slow-moving lava, to its shattering conclusion. That said, a production can diminish a great play, and in the new National Theatre, they have managed this to a degree. It is a long piece that takes a great deal of time and exposition to set up that great last act,…
Continue Reading →Tom Stoppard
(3 July 1937 to 29 November 2025) Playwright Tom Stoppard was a signal for wit, intellect, complexity of life and ideas, and verbal virtuosity, even when he was in ‘speech-writing’ mode. His first major play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), a riff on the treacherous school chums of Hamlet, made his name (although Harold Bloom described the play as “Beckett obsessed”). When asked by a theatregoer in New York, “What is it about?” he reportedly replied: “It’s about to earn me a great deal of money.” Better plays include Travesties (1974), where characters such as James Joyce and the…
Continue Reading →No Swiss Bliss
(Eurovision Song Contest, Basal, 2025) “in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Thus Harry Lime to Holly Martins in The Third Man, and whilst Orson Welles, who apparently wrote the line, failed to mention the creation of toblerone, there is still a harsh truth about this beautiful, woke, sterile country. So it is a pity that it played…
Continue Reading →The Watsons
[Directed by Matthew Chapman, written by Laura Wade, from the unfinished novel by Jane Austen – University of Adelaide Theatre Guild, 1 August 2025] Claire Tomalin, in her excellent Jane Austen: A Life (1997) wrote: “She…started on a new novel, which she called The Watsons. The first thing that strikes you about it is that it is the story of a group of youngish women – four sisters – who are all unmarried, have very little money, and are casting about more or less desperately to remedy their situation before their invalid father dies, when they know they will be…
Continue Reading →An Evening Without Kate Bush
(Adelaide Fringe, Garden of Unearthly Delights, 13 March 2025) Kate Bush, is, like one of her influencers Emily Bronte, both genius and mystic. Her look, her voice, her entire unique and brilliant oeuvre, have entranced us ever since her debut in 1978, aged 19. Sarah-Louise Young is clearly a Kate obsessive, and her show, a dizzy mash-note, is clearly for fans (we mean that in a good way), the Fish People, but it is witty and vibrant enough to please those ignorant of Kate-World. Whilst the music is pre-recorded, Young is not: her voice is strong and she inhabits the…
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