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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

The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, arguably the world’s most famous choir, is undertaking another Australian tour. It is travelling with two programs, both of which include a variety of music from the late Renaissance to the present day, and is performing in all mainland state capitals, as well as the national capital. ... (read more)

Brent Harris: Surrender & Catch

Art Gallery of South Australia
by
23 July 2024
Art travels, or it does not – in the latter case, often unjustly. Artists known in one country are not always visible beyond it, just as national cultures of literature and music often develop and remain supported entirely from within. This does not mean, however, that the artists, writers, and musicians themselves are untravelled, nor that their individual practices evolve in ignorance of what is happening elsewhere. ... (read more)

Cost of Living 

Sydney Theatre Company
by
22 July 2024
‘The shit that happens is not to be understood,’ declares the character Eddie Torres in the first line of Martyna Majok’s Cost of Living. Eddie, played by a beautifully burly Philip Quast, inaugurates the play with this bald statement of life’s incomprehensibility. Some are born rich and safe; others into abuse and strife. ... (read more)

Tótem 

Hi Gloss Entertainment
by
22 July 2024
Children occupy a special place at the Berlinale, which rolls around every year in Brandenburg during frosty February. Unlike many other top-tier competition film festivals, Berlin provides a whole strand, Generation – divided into ‘Kplus’ and ‘14plus’ – devoted to films about the world of die kinder. Though crafted by adults, these works have a certain sympathy with the world view of those much younger. ... (read more)

Stereophonic 

Golden Theatre
by
18 July 2024
There is a perennial fascination with the nature of creativity – what ignites it, what sustains it, and what, too often, destroys it. In this, creativity might be viewed as analogous to life itself, the consequence of a complex array of often unpredictable connections and influences, its ultimate viability always uncertain. That any individual cell of an idea develops into a fully fledged work of art, let alone one that survives across the centuries, is no less than miraculous. ... (read more)

A Streetcar Named Desire 

Melbourne Theatre Company
by
16 July 2024
Since its première in 1947, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire has become one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated plays. The demanding role of the tragic Southern belle Blanche Dubois has been played by some of the world’s great actresses, including Vivien Leigh, Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert, in Polish director Krysztof Warlikowski’s extraordinary reimagining at the 2012 Adelaide Festival. ... (read more)

Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson

National Gallery of Victoria
by
15 July 2024

Grace Crowley & Ralph Balson may well get lost in the promotion of other exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria, but it is one not to be missed. Charting Crowley and Balson’s artistic journeys from the 1930s to the 1960s and their shared commitment to abstraction, it is an elegant, beautiful show that affords the rare opportunity to experience their work in depth.

... (read more)

Macbeth (an undoing) 

Malthouse Theatre
by
11 July 2024
Feminist reimaginings of canonical male-authored texts are nothing new. In fact, following innumerable retellings of the Greek myths, the trend may have peaked last year with the publication of novels spotlighting the marginalised female characters of, among others, Nineteen Eighty-Four (both Katherine Bradley’s The Sisterhood and Sandra Newman’s Julia), Arthurian legend (Sophie Keetch’s Morgan Is My Name), and Romeo and Juliet (Natasha Solomons’s Fair Rosaline). ... (read more)

These words put the case for and against Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) in a nutshell. Kihara speaks with the authority of a Pasifika, a transgender Japanese-Samoan artist who wittily restaged two dozen Gauguin paintings as colour photographs in her Paradise Camp series. Kihara dressed and posed Fa’afafine – men living and dressing in the manner of women – and her work cements the iconic status of Gauguin’s ‘wonderful’ imagery.

... (read more)

Prima Facie 

Black Swan Theatre
by
08 July 2024

Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie continues its triumphant procession at home and abroad with Black Swan State Theatre’s production in Perth, under the direction of Kate Champion. A hit at its première at Sydney’s Griffin Theatre in 2019 and in post-Covid seasons in Melbourne, Broadway, and the West End (winning the 2023 Olivier Award for Best New Play), not to mention in South Asia and Northern Europe, it now arrives in Perth, where Miller received her first mainstage production (of Dust) in 2014.

... (read more)