Category Archive: THEATRE
The Woman in Black
Adelaide Festival Theatre, Dunstan Playhouse, 24 May 2024 The Woman in Black is an adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 Gothic novel, by Stephen Mallatratt, concerning a mysterious spectre that haunts Eel Marsh House in a small, remote English town. It’s a hoary old piece, and a tad clunky, but the novel, film and TV versions, and the play, have been consistently popular – only The Mousetrap (another mediocre piece) has had a longer run on the West End. There’s some post-modern, story-about-a-story business, as Arthur Kipps (John Waters), a self-effacing and strangely diminished solicitor, tries to enliven his story for…
Continue Reading →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 →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…
Continue Reading →Good
(written by C. P. Taylor (1981); Directed by Dominic Cooke, Harold Pinter Theatre, London, 25 June 2023) Regarding the grand achievements of the Third Reich, “As with Stalin’s Great Terror, only a madman could guess what was on the way. Even the perpetrators had to go one step at a time, completing each step before they realised that the next one was possible.”* In “Good,” A liberal German Professor of literature (NOT Victor Klemperer), named John Halder, becomes involved with the Third Reich’s war machine and the Final Solution. Halder, a ‘good man,’ shows all the moral courage of Albert…
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