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Kip Williams

Dracula 

Sydney Theatre Company
by
08 July 2024

For the past thirty years, breakthroughs in video and sound technology have, for better or worse, seeped into live performance. For better in the case of Kip William’s production of Suddenly Last Summer and Lindy Hume and Dave Bergman’s Winterreise for Musica Viva. For worse with David Livermore/Opera Australia’s ludicrous Anna Bolena and Ivo van Hove’s self-indulgent All About Eve.

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The Picture of Dorian Gray 

Sydney Theatre Company
by
19 April 2024
There can be few superlatives left to describe Sarah Snook’s performance in Kip Williams’s London staging of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray – for the simple reason that she’s that good. Three days after I saw the play, at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, Snook was awarded the Olivier Award for best actress. According to the Guardian’s Lanre Bakare’s summation of the awards on 14 April, she was, from an impressive list, the sole ‘marquee name’ to do so. ... (read more)

The Tempest 

Sydney Theatre Company
by
05 December 2022
The Sydney Theatre Company’s staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, directed by Kip Williams, is centred around a large rock set on a revolving mechanism that assists with scene changes and helps to animate this rather static play about characters shipwrecked on a tropical island. The rock is reminiscent of the story of Prometheus, chained forever to a large rock by Zeus, but this is the ‘hard rock’ to which Caliban (the only character native to the island) is banished by the lordly Prospero, which reminds us that the island (and perhaps even the play) is Caliban’s domain. ... (read more)

This month Sydney is host to two productions inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1888). The first, from Sydney Theatre Company, signals director Kip Williams’s return to the Roslyn Packer Theatre following the success of his 2019 production, The Picture of Dorian Gray. The second, from director Hayden Tee, offers a subversive revival of the much-maligned 1990 ‘gothic thriller musical’ Jekyll and Hyde by Frank Wildhorn and Leslie Bricusse at Hayes Theatre Co. ‘Man is not one but two’, Stevenson famously writes ...

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If Shakespeare’s tragedies, Macbeth seems the most prescient, apposite to a species rapidly running out of world. Upon hearing of the Witches’ prophecy, and resolving her course with chilling alacrity, Lady Macbeth invokes the nether realm of her potentialities:

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me, from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty.
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