In this fortnight's Update: The 2019 British Film Festival tours Australia, Monash University brings The Dressmaker to the stage in a new musical, Calibre Essay Prize winners revisit their works in new ways, The 2019 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship, Applications closing for Bell Shakespeare's John Bell Scholarship, Degenerate Art comes to the Old Fitz Theatre, Giveaways from the British Film Festival, Black Swan State Theatre Company, Melbourne Opera, and Monash University ...

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 ...

As a resident of Portland, Oregon in the 1980s and 1990s, director Gus Van Sant became used to the sight of the iconic and iconoclastic cartoonist John Callahan buzzing around the city in his wheelchair. ‘He was a visible person on the street,’ Van Sant said recently on Marc Maron’s podcast ...

'When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.’ It issurely one of the most celebrated, and arresting, opening lines in all literature – very ‘Kafkaesque’, in fact! It was just a matter of time before The Metamorphosis ...

In this fortnight's Update: The Calibre Essay Prize is still open for entries; the $100,000 Ian Potter Moving Image Commission; the Alexander Theatre reopens at Monash University; David Williamson on his new play Nearer the Gods; the KYD New Critic Award 2019; the Australian Short Story Festival returns to Perth; and some giveaways ...

Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes – first performed in 1945 (Sadler’s Wells, London) – is an opera about an oddball misanthropic fisherman. On opening night, the audience were primed to engage with Britten’s anti-hero, never suspecting that a real-life hero would soon be needed ...

An impassioned ovation greeted the exceptional, all-giving dancers of The Australian Ballet and musicians of Orchestra Victoria at the packed première of the company’s new production of Spartacus. The familiarity of the story of oppressed slaves and gladiators fighting the Roman Republic for ...

I confess that I do not share the knee-jerk negative view of Andrew Lloyd Weber musicals that many of my colleagues profess. His best works, especially those conceived with librettist Tim Rice, stake a legitimate claim on our attention, if only for their consummate skill in identifying ...

It is not entirely hyperbolic to claim that for more than half a century, Dario Fo and his partner in life and performance, Franca Rame, were the theatrical conscience of Italy. In a variety of theatrical forms and with a series of different companies, they toured the country, playing to huge ...

In this fortnight's Update: Australian Damon Herriman to play Charles Manson in Tarantino film, Australian film The Nightingale wins Venice awards, the legendary Borodin Quartet tours for Musica Viva, AGSA hosts first major Ben Quilty exhibition, Des Cowley on the 2018 Wangaratta Jazz Festival, and some giveaways ...