Ireland’s now infamous ‘mother and baby homes’ have been the subject of several films. Aisling Walsh’s Sinners (2002), Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002), and Stephen Frear’s Philomena (2013), as well as numerous documentaries, have focused on the abuses suffered by the women detained in these homes and the fates of their children, many of them sold to wealthy families. According to the Irish Government’s 2021 Commission of Investigation into the homes, between 1922 and 1995, approximately 56,000 unmarried women and 57,000 children were detained, at least 9000 of the children not surviving their time in the institutions. As Claire Keegan writes in the Afterword to her 2021 novella, upon which this film is based, ‘Many girls and women lost their babies. Some lost their lives. Some or most lost the lives they would have had.’

Umberto Eco said of Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) that ‘it is one of the most exciting novels ever written and on the other hand, it is one of the most badly written novels of all time and in any literature’. It was the unnecessary length and the repetitions that appalled him most. Yet when he tried to produce a more elegant, distilled translation, he gave up: he began to wonder if the repetitions and redundancies were a necessary part of its structure.

Friday night’s Sydney Symphony treat at the Opera House’s Concert Hall was a sold-out affair. The audience sizzled with expectation at the prospect of hearing a ‘world celebrity’. Daniil Trifonov was in town ‘performing Rachmaninov’, as the informative program’s cover proclaimed. But which Rachmaninov? Well, it was Trifonov’s favourite among Rachmaninov’s four concertos: the Fourth.

Picasso/Asia: A Conversation, at M+ in Hong Kong, is simply splendid. It is innovative: not a standard chronological parade of ‘masterpieces’, but a rich and probing interrogation of the most famous European artist of the twentieth century, paired with an intelligent consideration of the impact of his work in Asia, and how it connected with Asian artists.

The pairing of two Australian soloists – Siobhan Stagg (soprano) and Kristian Bezuidenhout (fortepiano) – in top form with one of the world’s finest period music ensembles, and in an all-Mozart program, was always likely to be a winning concert combination, and so it proved to be. This second of two Melbourne concerts by the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra during their current tour was delivered with consummate style to a delighted and near-capacity audience at the Melbourne Recital Hall.

Is Henry V Shakespeare’s worst play? No, that unhappy honour goes to The Taming of the Shrew, an anti-comedy that grows more rancid with each passing year.