Category Archive: THEATRE
Hamlet Sings! We Laugh!
Hamlet, Glyndebourne Festival Opera production, Adelaide Festival Theatre, 6 March 2018 You know the story, or perhaps you can condense it into one word, as did the English stage director Tyrone Guthrie: “Mummy!” But you might prefer to concentrate on the post-modern man Shakespeare seems to have had in mind with Hamlet: “the revolutionary whose manners and ways of life are attached to the old régime, whose ideals and loyalties belong to the new, and who, by a kind of courageous exhibitionism is compelled to tell the truth about both.”* Bloom calls the play (which admittedly, has its own structural…
Continue Reading →Co-Operate! See the Barber of Seville
'Figaro sù, Figaro giù! Figaro quà, Figaro la!'
A Co-Opera production, Waverley House, Willunga, 21 April; Adelaide Showground, 22, 28 & 29 April. The Varnished Culture has already enthused about Rossini’s little piece – the Barber of Seville is nigh perfect, and whilst Co-Opera – the nation’s only dedicated touring Opera Company – runs on a shoestring, this production not only deserves your support but is likely to command your attention and admiration as well.
Continue Reading →The Cherry Orchard
Chekhov’s great sad comedy premiered in Moscow on this day (17 January) in 1904. A devastating satire on the necessity to change and its collision with people impervious to change, it is the first great 20th century play, hugely influential in its grand theme of entropy (and we add, with as much modesty as possible, that the broken, reverberating lute string terminating Acts II and IV – “The distant sound is heard, as if from the sky, of a breaking string, dying away sadly” – inspired the champagne cork trope in The Varnished Culture‘s short play, Jenny Had it Coming.) …
Continue Reading →Lettice and Lovage
(By Peter Shaffer) (Directed by Angela Short) (Adelaide University Theatre Guild, 11 October 2017) Though he is better known for his darker pieces, Peter Shaffer had a big hit in the 1980s with this droll dig at the decline of modern standards, and the often opaque ways of the Heritage Mafia, subjects close to The Varnished Culture‘s heart. Once again, Shaffer sets rational Apollo in opposition to romantic Dionysus, this time to richly humorous effect. Miss Lettice Douffet is a tour guide at “Fustian House” in Wiltshire, an ancient pile so dreary and unremarkable that it wouldn’t even get a page in…
Continue Reading →Three Tall Women
(By Edward Albee) (Adelaide University Theatre Guild premiere, 9 August 2017) Albee’s slices of New England life, where families light up and tear each other down, succeed on the whole because he was a master of exteriors that demonstrated the angst within. With this unsatisfactory work of his later period, however, he is working from within and as such the play never catches fire. An act of ‘exorcism’ to help the playwright debride the memory of his domineering adoptive mother, the first part has a bedridden old lady (aged 92? 91?) attended by her former self and misunderstood by her younger…
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