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Brian McFarlane

Othello (Bell Shakespeare) ★★★★

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18 July 2016
Othello (Bell Shakespeare)

Whatever else Peter Evans's production of Othello has going for it, and it has indeed much, the speaking of Shakespeare's verse is outstanding. It is never declamatory, in the way that some famous actors of earlier decades dealt with it. The verse emerges entirely intact, but is always made to ...

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Mad Dog Morgan by Jake Wilson

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January-February 2016, no. 378
Brian McFarlane reviews 'Mad Dog Morgan' by Jake Wilson

The evocative Prologue to this book has a poetic precision that bodes well for its treatment of this too-long neglected film, and what follows more than answers such expectations.

Jake Wilson's analysis (resuscitation might be a better word) of the 1976 Australian bushranging adventure,

Arts Highlights of the Year

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November 2015, no. 376

To highlight Australian Book Review's arts coverage and to celebrate some of the year's memorable concerts, operas, films, ballets, plays, and exhibitions, we invited a group of critics and arts professionals to nominate their favourites – and to nominate one production they are looking forward to in 2016. (We indicate which works were reviewed in Arts Up ...

Double-Act: The remarkable lives and careers of Googie Withers and John McCallum by Brian McFarlane

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June-July 2015, no. 372
Desley Deacon reviews 'Double-Act' by Brian McFarlane

Although many attempt it, writing the biography of an actor of a previous era is fraught. They consist mainly of lists of movies or plays long forgotten. The reception of their art is recorded by critics, once all-powerful, but now unknown. Their personal life and personality are hidden behind a screen of studio publicity. Writing the lives and careers of two stars ...

Eugene O'Neill: A Life In Four Acts by Robert M. Dowling

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May 2015, no. 371
Brian McFarlane reviews 'Eugene O'Neill' by Robert M. Dowling

It seems unlikely that anyone ever emerged from the performance of an O’Neill play saying happily, ‘Laugh! I nearly died.’ Robert M. Dowling’s fine biography helps to account for this: the life behind the writing of those plays was not conducive to a hilarious outcome. To have survived the life he lived would have been remarkable enough, let alone turning ou ...

Arts Highlights of the Year

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January-February 2015, no. 368

Leading arts critics and professionals nominate some of their favourite performances for 2014.

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Wolf Hall on Stage

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22 May 2014

Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novel Wolf Hall has now been dramatised, along with its sequel, Bring up the Bodies. Brian McFarlane, a regular ABR film and theatre critic, caught the new Royal Shakespeare Company production in London.

If, like me, you were not a fan of Hilary Mantel’s historical doorstops, Wolf Hall (2009) ...

Stage Blood: Five Tempestuous Years in the Early Life of the National Theatre by Michael Blakemore

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February 2014, no. 358
Brian McFarlane reviews 'Stage Blood: Five tempestuous years in the early life of the National Theatre' by Michael Blakemore

Anyone lucky enough to have read Arguments with England (2004), the first volume of Michael Blakemore’s memoirs, will be eager to read the second, Stage Blood, in which he traces the tumultuous history of his years at London’s National Theatre. Further, anyone as lucky as I was to see such productions of his as Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1971 will be agog to read the new book in the hope of insights about their genesis. Such people will not be disappointed.

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Mr Pip

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November 2013, no. 356

Film-wise, 2013 has been the year of adapting dangerously. Dangerously, that is, in the sense of daring to affront devoted readers of the original novels or plays, valuing enterprise over fidelity. Now, just after admirable versions of Much Ado about Nothing and What Maisie Knew have finished their runs, we have director–screenwriter Andrew Ada ...

What Maisie Knew

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October 2013, no. 355

The last twelve months have seen some notable film reworkings of classic literary texts, with Anna Karenina set in a theatre, a black Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, and a gorgeous Much Ado About Nothing enacted in monochrome contemporary California. Now we have a compelling version of Henry James’s novel What Maisie Knew (1897), ...

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