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Recent reviews

Film  |  Theatre  |  Art  |  Opera  |  Music  |  Television  |  Festivals

Welcome to ABR Arts, home to some of Australia's best arts journalism. We review film, theatre, opera, music, television, art exhibitions – and more. To read ABR Arts articles in full, subscribe to ABR or take out an ABR Arts subscription. Both packages give full access to our arts reviews the moment they are published online and to our extensive arts archive.

Meanwhile, the ABR Arts e-newsletter, published every second Tuesday, will keep you up-to-date as to our recent arts reviews.

 

Recent reviews

Tannhäuser 

Opera Australia
by •
18 May 2023
Stefan Vinke as Tannhäuser and Amber Wagner as Elisabeth (photograph by Jeff Busby).

Let’s start with the complexities of the opera itself. The trouble with Tannhäuser is that Wagner, always his own worst enemy (but only just), could not leave it alone. Its performance history is more or less bookended by the two distinct versions of the opera: the original 1845 Dresden version; and the Paris one of 1861, commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III. I

... (read more)

Saint Omer 

Palace Films
by •
16 May 2023
Guslagie Malanda as Laurence (courtesy of Palace Films)
Women look at women in Saint Omer, and they look at each other looking. We look at them looking. In what is almost the opening scene of the film, a writer and academic named Rama (Kayije Kagame) lectures to a class of undergraduates, mostly young women. They are watching footage from the aftermath of World War II: women who slept with German soldiers are loaded onto carts, their heads shorn, and paraded through the streets as collaborators. ... (read more)

Limbo 

Bunya Productions
by •
16 May 2023
Simon Baker as Travis and Natasha Wanganeen as Emma (courtesy of Bunya Productions)
At one moment in Ivan Sen’s new film Limbo (Bunya Productions), I suddenly felt as though I was watching a German Expressionist film from the 1920s, that era in silent cinema when the expressive power of the image reached its zenith, when mood emanates from every surface and character was crafted by an indivisible composite of elaborately constructed sets, sculptural lighting, texture, composition, and the gestural and postural performance of actors. ... (read more)

Loaded 

Malthouse Theatre
by •
15 May 2023
Danny Ball as Ari in Loaded (photograph by Tamarah Scott).
Christos Tsiolkas’s début novel Loaded (1995), the story of a single, debauched night in the life of nineteen-year-old Greek-Australian queer man, Ari, is no stranger to being given fresh life in new mediums. In 1998, it served as the basis for the film Head On, a breakthrough for director Ana Kokkinos and star Alex Dimitriades, even as its sexual explicitness proved controversial. ... (read more)

Hamnet 

Royal Shakespeare Company
by •
09 May 2023
Hamnet (photograph by Manuel Harlan).
Written prior to the onset of Covid-19, Maggie O’Farrell’s novelistic reimagining of the life and death (in the plague) of Shakespeare’s son was presciently published at the end of March 2020, as the United Kingdom entered lockdown. Three years, and one and a half million sales, later, Hamnet is being made into a film. ... (read more)

The Teachers' Lounge 

German Film Festival
by •
08 May 2023
Leonie Benesch as Frau Carla Nowak in The Teachers' Lounge (courtesy of Palace Films).

Frau Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) stands in front of her class. A student volunteers a solution to the mathematical problem on the board. Carla responds, ‘Is that proof, or an assertion?’ This question will come to haunt Carla later, when it re-emerges in the school’s socio-political context, far messier than mathematics.

... (read more)

November 

Palace Films
by •
08 May 2023
Jean Dujardin as Fred in November (courtesy of Palace Films).
There have been nuanced treatments of the November 2015 Paris attacks, including the docuseries November 3: Attack on Paris (2018), the excellent En thérapie (2021), which deals with post-traumatic stress in a counterterrorist agent who is also a Muslim, and Mikhaël Hers’ sublime human drama Amanda (2018) which looks at the aftermath of terrorism in an understated fashion. ... (read more)

Happy Days 

Melbourne Theatre Company
by •
08 May 2023
Judith Lucy in Happy Days (photograph by Pia Johnson).
A middle-aged woman, Winnie, is buried to her waist in the middle of a mound, amidst a dry, monotonous expanse while the scorching sun beats down. It is one of Beckett’s indelible theatrical images. She finds solace in her handbag, where she uncovers a domestic detritus that affords her the rituals and distractions that help her endure: comb, toothbrush, mirror, hat, music box. ... (read more)

Mahler’s Seventh 

London Symphony Orchestra
by •
08 May 2023
Simon Rattle with the London Symphony Orchestra (photograph by Laura Manariti).
Throughout his long, prolific, and fulfilling musical life, Simon Rattle has never misused time; rather, he has relished it, always with the same energetic sense of purpose and clarity of execution that has made him such an extraordinary musician. ... (read more)

SYNERGY: Tony Tuckson – drawing into painting

by •
05 May 2023
Untitled (Brown and Grey), 1973, TP 200 (courtesy of the Tuckson Estate and Rogue Pop-up Gallery, Sydney)
I bump into two friends at the opening of SYNERGY and we peer into Tony Tuckson’s works, finding allegiances with and hints of other artists: the red, black, and white palette of Philip Guston; Ian Fairweather’s shallow space and densely patterned linework hovering between figuration and abstraction; Cy Twombly’s intricate, repetitive gestures; the torn edge of a calligraphic Robert Motherwell brushstroke in fluid black paint. ... (read more)
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