Theatre

Anxiety and agitation failing to translate into action as an exhausted and exhausting world faces an uncertain future – the contemporary relevance of The Cherry Orchard requires no special pleading. Retaining the characters and narrative trajectory of the play written by Anton Chekhov in 1903, Australian director Benedict Andrews employs music and contemporary diction in an ambitious production that takes the humour in Chekhov’s final play seriously.

For the past decade, French writer Édouard Louis has been excavating and recuperating a childhood spent in a state of acute precarity in the Hauts-de-France. He has written both critically and empathetically about the lives of his parents and siblings, while also casting a probing eye on himself. His first novel, the autofictional En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (The End of Eddy, trans. Michael Lucey, 2014), was published when he was only twenty-two and has enjoyed significant success in translation.

The enduring popularity of The Threepenny Opera is often attributed to Kurt Weill’s music rather than Bertolt Brecht’s text. As director Barrie Kosky notes with characteristic hyperbole in the Adelaide Festival program for his new production with the Berliner Ensemble: ‘Weill … is as important for the history of music theatre as Wagner.’