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Brahms composed his German Requiem between 1865 and 1868. His longest composition, with text not in the requiem’s traditional Latin but derived from the German Luther Bible, its conception is humanist rather than religious, the libretto – written by Brahms himself – a meditation not on Christian redemption but on mortality and suffering, consolation and
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On 1 September 2004, around 30 terrorists demanding Chechen independence attacked School Number One in Beslan, North Ossetia. The date had been carefully chosen: the traditional start of the Russian school year – known as ‘First Bell’ or ‘Knowledge Day’ – when the school is packed not only with students, but also many of their
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In 2013, Hotel Modern presented Kamp at the Adelaide Festival of Arts, a production that, in the Dutch company’s signature style, deployed sound, video, sculpture, and puppetry to tell the story of the concentration camp at Auschwitz. The work, featuring a scale model of the camp and thousands of miniature figures, found new resonances in
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We are told, as we are told every year since it went annual in 2012, that Adelaide Festival of the Arts box office revenues are better than ever. Such statistics can, of course, be fudged with the minimum of effort but, even if it were true, what do such numbers really mean? At a recent
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I once heard a notable playwright say during a workshop she was giving that Australian plays don’t often deal with powerful people – the middle classes, yes, and, to a lesser extent, the underprivileged and downtrodden, but rarely what passes for this country’s upper echelons. From the moment the curtain rises on veteran designer Mark
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Fresh from her critically lauded feature film debut, Girl Asleep, Windmill Theatre co-artistic director Rosemary Myers turns her undoubted talents to Rumpelstiltskin, a freewheeling adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairytale co-written with frequent collaborator Julianne O’Brien. It’s the third installment in an unofficial trilogy of children’s theatre works co-produced with the State Theatre Company of
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Five years and multiple workshops in the making – the first of them ‘self-funded’ by director Gale Edwards and composer George Palmer – the opera of Tim Winton’s beloved Cloudstreet finally arrives, heaving and shuddering like that famous weatherboard house at number one Cloud Street, on the stage. There is, poll after poll has told us,
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The State Theatre Company of SA’s annual education slot used to be filled with old plays that were deemed useful for school-aged students to know about: The Zoo Story, The Dumb Waiter, those sorts of things. The past few years, however, have seen a change of focus to new works that reflect the lives of
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It goeth thus: Shakespeare’s most noted amateur thespians, the rude mechanicals, gather to rehearse A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s play-within-a-play Pyramus and Thisbe. Should they be able to rise above their lowly station and general incompetence, their play will form part of an evening of entertainment for the newly married royal couple.
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“Existence,” hard-boiled cop Grubbe (Colin Friels) tells Jimmy (Tom Conroy), a drug addict and pusher who Grubbe is courting to turn informant, “is an endless circle of life and death. But ultimately, the aim of all life is self-destruction. That’s mortido.”
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