Brian Friel’s play Faith Healer is now considered to be, if not his masterpiece Translations (1980) probably takes that distinction at least one of his most successful works, but it took a while before its sneakily subverted approach to truth and illusion was appreciated. Its 1979 Broadway première ...

In the notes accompanying this year’s Melbourne Festival, artistic director Jonathan Holloway stated that his diverse program was designed to ‘puncture the creative borders between artforms’. The concept of artistic cross-fertilisation is hardly new, nor does it always result in something worth ...

‘There are no ugly women, only lazy ones’ was Helena Rubinstein’s attitude to personal allure, and her mantra has been a source of hope and steely resolve to the millions of customers who have bought her cosmetics and unguents over the past century. Although she died in 1965, the Rubinstein ...

ABR Art issue launch, Women In Theatre, The Guarneri cello, Anna Bolena, Patrick White Literary Award, and a Melbourne Opera giveaway ...

The Weimar period in Germany – spanning less than fifteen years following the end of World War I through to the coup d’état by the National Socialists in 1933 – was crucial in shaping modern Germany. The nation was in a ruinous state because of its wartime defeat, crippling reparations ...

Well, it wasn’t the usual demure Melbourne Festival crowd that piled into the Merlyn Theatre for the opening of Life and Opinions of Two Dogs: the local expat Chinese community was out in force, and the place was buzzing. Two Dogs follows the adventures of a couple of country mutts ...

Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Puccini’s La Bohème has been delighting audiences (and enriching the company) since its première in 1981. Many of the world’s greatest singers have appeared in it:- since the first cast, which included Teresa Stratas, José Carreras, Renata Scotto, and James Morris ...

Early in Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) there is a striking description of Anu Singh, the Canberra law student arrested in 1997 for drugging her boyfriend Joe Cinque with a cocktail of heroin and Rohypnol. In court one morning, Singh uses the interval before the judge’s arrival ...

There have been a handful of occasions in my life when I have stood before a work of art intending to look at it, appraise it, only to find myself drawn into it. In some strange way I become part of the work. It is as if my imagination has merged with the imaginative space of the art work and, at the ...

It was hard not to think of Tchaikovsky’s words, written during the first Bayreuth Festival (1876), at the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2016–17 season. Arts Update, selfless as ever, had gone ahead of the ABR US tour party, still rusticating in New Haven, for the American première of ...