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Theatre historian and academic Julian Meyrick returns home to London in July and finds the UK gripped in a kind of collective madness as the ticking countdown clock of Brexit gets louder. So many things have been, are being, and will be written about Brexit, that offering additional thoughts on the subject feels spectacularly redundant, like squirting
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Disney’s new The Lion King remake opens with the sounds of birds chirping and the sight of a golden sun rising into a majestic skyline. Nants, ingonyama! What a scene this is! There are giraffes, zebras, elephants, the whole damn animal kingdom jiggling along to the rhythms of a bright and busy natural world, full
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You can look into the moon, deeply and for a long time. When it’s full it can hold you spellbound. At other phases, such as crescent, it can conjure a rambling of the mind. When you look into the night, you don’t have to blink, you don’t have to worry about retina damage, as if
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By Anders Furze
It’s a brave new world at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, the first for new artistic director Al Cossar after the departure of Michelle Carey. Long-time screening venue the Australian Centre for the Moving Image is out of action due to renovations, and the festival’s footprint has expanded to some 20 venues, including Carlton’s
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Monrovia, Indiana Frederick Wiseman returns to MIFF with this portrait of one small town deep inside America. A festival stalwart, Wiseman is keenly aware of the power of editing to create meaning. His observational documentaries gradually but powerfully nudge us to find meaning in juxtaposition, to extremely compelling effect. Words and Silk: the Imaginary and Real
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The tale of Sweeney Todd – the ‘demon barber of Fleet Street’ who slit the throats of his victims and then passed on their corpses to Mrs Lovett, who turned them into meat pies – was first published in a Victorian serialised novel or ‘penny dreadful’ called ‘The String of Pearls’, and almost immediately turned
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By Anders Furze
It’s undoubtedly a remarkable story. In the immediate wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the entire United States airspace was shut down. Almost 7,000 passengers on 38 planes were diverted to the remote town of Gander in Newfoundland, Canada. Locals spent the following week hosting the “come from aways” and something of an impromptu
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The Torrents is not, in fact, a play about the battle faced by content creators against illegal downloaders. Stand down, tech-heads. It is, though, a play that speaks forcibly to the current moment. Unabashedly, somewhat gracelessly, so, if through a prism of a particular slice of 19th century pioneer Australiana. Its star is obvious from
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By Anders Furze
Towards the end of Shakespeare in Love, Melbourne Theatre Company’s major 2019 production, the play returns to an image of Shakespeare sitting and writing at his desk, illuminated by candlelight. The moment jolts: for much of its running time, this is a portrait of writing that’s social and highly energetic. It’s also a portrait of
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S-27 (or Security Prison 27) was a former secondary school in Phnom Penh that was used by the Khmer Rouge to imprison, interrogate, torture and execute those who were deemed to be enemies of the regime. From 1975 to 1979 an estimated 20,000 people were incarcerated there, of whom almost all were killed. Forced confessions
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