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How did a precociously young British woman become one of the most performed contemporary playwrights in the English language theatre? Almost exclusively through merit, it must be said, so you can’t blame the Sydney Theatre Company for serving up a third Lucy Kirkwood play in as many years, following Chimerica in 2017 and The Children
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Ninety minutes. Forteen numbers. Two actors. One love story. Sounds easy enough, right? The Last Five Years, like successful relationships, is harder than it looks. Jason Robert Brown’s 2001 song cycle of love won and lost is a precocious early-career project fiendishly difficult to perform (and revered by musical theatre heads as a result). The
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You know that Simpsons episode where Mr Burns and Smithers drug Tom Jones and chain him to a stage to perform at gunpoint for Marge and Homer? “Get help, love,” Tom whispers to Marge between verses of It’s Not Unusual. “Call Interpol, get me a hacksaw, anything.” It came to me as I watched Marcia
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Here’s a story ripped from the headlines … of a small-town newspaper serving a rural community of not many. Melanie Tait, an ABC broadcaster and fledgling playwright, wanted to feel closer to her hometown of Robertson in New South Wales, a good few hours in traffic from Sydney. This is potato country and each year
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Like the No. 1 subway through the Upper West Side, a thin line bisects this alfresco West Side Story on Sydney Harbour. The difference between a great night out and a miserable one? Just add water, as us fancy-frocked freeloaders found on opening night when the heavens opened just as the orchestra struck up the
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What are we to make of Salome—Richard Strauss’ one-act opera after Oscar Wilde’s one-act play—in an age of religious emergency, female empowerment and sexual awakening? What are we to make of a woman as both gruesome sexual fantasy and ghoulish sexual aggressor? A woman of the male gaze rendered so powerful? A heroine so shockingly
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A cry in the dark. A man desperate to die. The gas from the oven is hissing. “I turned my gaze to the ceiling,” Gabriel says. “Jesus … I’d left the skylight open.” And so he must go on. With more purpose. “There’s a lot to do when you decide to live.” The lights then
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As opera love triangles go, this one is pretty staid: boy and girl are engaged, girl falls for another boy before the wedding, who gets a little clingy. If scandal is what you want you’d be better off staying at home with Married At First Sight. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s book, from which this opera
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I am a white (if not straight) man. And I didn’t much like Nakkiah Lui’s blunt, irregularly funny new Sydney Theatre Company play How To Rule The World. My cultural confession is Lui’s idea, one I’m happy enough to make. As she writes on Twitter: “My gender and racial identity are mentioned in every review,
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Bitchy queens and their unruly courts are quite the flavour of the month, aren’t they? There’s big screen Oscars pick The Favourite with Queen Anne and her scheming same-sex suitors. Princess Margaret is proving quite the handful on Netflix’s The Crown. Meghan (Markle) and Kate (Middleton) are at each other’s throats, if you believe the
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