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Tim Byrne
Tim Byrne is a freelance writer and theatre critic for Australian Book Review and Time Out Melbourne. He is currently working on a novel. Tim is also a bookseller and interviewer, running a series of author interviews at Avenue Bookstore. He maintains an arts blog that focuses on theatre, film, and books.
While the bulk of Samuel Beckett’s monumental reputation rests on the plays – especially the mid-career, mid-century works that include Waiting for Godot (1953), Endgame (1955–57), and Happy Days (1961) – it is the novels that afford the most prolonged, immersive access to his enduring concerns and preoccupations. While Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953) are consid ... (read more)
The notion of the sad clown probably has its origins in prehistory; the mockery of pain and sorrow is such an embedded human trait that indigenous cultures around the world embraced it long before it became a trope of commedia dell’arte. Pierrot, with his iconic painted white face and billowing white costume, is the universal symbol for sad clowning. He is sad because he pines for Columbine, who ... (read more)
Gay theatre, or at least identifiably queer theatre, has never had much of a presence in Australia; most of what we consider canonical has come from overseas. The Elizabethan stage had Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare had two characters named Antonio, in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, who are fairly obviously queer. Since then, most quintessentially gay theatre has come from the Un ... (read more)
The idea of joining Robyn Archer – arguably the greatest cabaret artist in the country – for a night of French chanson that harks back to her seminal 1991 show Le Chat Noir was inspired. While Archer is most closely associated with German Kabarett of the Weimar, she is no slouch when it comes to interpretations of the Gallic variety. She certainly convinced the French themselves, who made her ... (read more)
Merrily We Roll Along (1981) isn’t Stephen Sondheim’s biggest flop. That honour goes to Anyone Can Whistle (1964), which closed after nine performances. Merrily outlasted it by seven performances, and of the two shows has since gone on to much greater critical acclaim. It’s the better piece; despite some great songs, Anyone Can Whistle is a bizarre outlier in Sondheim’s canon, but Merrily ... (read more)
It is a truism that great novelists rarely make great playwrights; Henry James tried to conquer the boards to disastrous effect with Guy Domville (1895), and writers from Virginia Woolf to James Joyce have failed to translate their genius for interiority to the stage. Charles Dickens, whose mastery of scene and dialogue would seem to make him a natural fit for the theatre, never made a good fist o ... (read more)
German playwright Frank Wedekind (1864–1918) was one of those rare artists whose work lies at the nexus of several major movements – in his case expressionism, modernism, and epic theatre – while never quite conforming to strict definitions of what those movements have come to mean. He suggests other, more famous artists to follow, like Brecht and Genet, but can also quite seriously lay clai ... (read more)
Unlike Martin Scorsese’s previous forays into the subject of spiritual faith, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Kundun (1997) – both of which used intense, almost delirious musical compositions to evoke a sense of religious fervour – his new film has no score at all. An adaptation of Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel Silence, it opens on the intensifying sounds of nature, the buzzing of g ... (read more)
For the first third of this film, you would be forgiven for thinking you were back under the influence of the Italian neorealists: largely non-professional actors in a realistic milieu; themes of poverty and deprivation; a child at the centre of the action. That it takes place in India only heightens the effect; it is difficult to conceive of a contemporary setting more dangerous or overwhelming f ... (read more)