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Arts

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

Julius Caesar 

Pinchgut Opera
by •
22 November 2024
Tim Mead as Julius Caesar and Samantha Clarke as Cleopatra (photograph by Brett Boardman)
When I was a young opera student in London many years ago, it became clear to me that there was a definite, if unwritten, vocal hierarchy. My performance interest was in the major composers of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, beginning with Mozart, but then Italian operas by Donizetti, Rossini, and Bellini, culminating in Verdi and Puccini, with the occasional French opera as part of the mix. If one was lucky to have a voice with the capacity to sing these roles, this became the focus of all one’s attention. ... (read more)

Die Walküre 

Sydney Symphony Orchestra
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18 November 2024
Simone Young conducts Die Walküre (photograph by Jay Patel and courtesy of Sydney Symphony Orchestra)
What a happy time this is for Wagnerians, with a memorable Ring cycle last year from Melbourne Opera in Bendigo, and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg to look forward to in February 2025 from that enterprising company. Opera Australia – unable to program Wagner in the miniscule Joan Sutherland Theatre after the embarrassments of its incomplete Ring of the early 1980s (notwithstanding some memorable casts, with the likes of Rita Hunter, Alberto Remedios, Lauris Elms, and Marilyn Richardson) – has presented the Ring thrice over the past decade, twice in Melbourne, once in Brisbane. ... (read more)

August: Osage County 

Belvoir St Theatre
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15 November 2024
Pamela Rabe as Violet and Amy Mathews as Ivy (photograph by Brett Boardman)
To misquote Tolstoy, all happy families are alike and all unhappy families sooner or later end up on the stage. From the house of Atreus to Jez Butterworth’s latest work, The Hills of California, presently on Broadway, familial dysfunction has been dissected and one could almost say celebrated innumerable times. ... (read more)

My Brilliant Career 

Melbourne Theatre Company
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13 November 2024
‘My Brilliant Career: A thrilling musical adaptation of Miles Franklin’s novel’ by Diane Stubbings

Let’s be clear about one thing from the outset. Any resemblance between this Melbourne Theatre Company musical adaptation of My Brilliant Career and the Miles Franklin novel of the same name seems, as times, purely coincidental.

... (read more)

Blitz 

Palace Films
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11 November 2024
Saoirse Ronan as Rita (courtesy of Palace)
The opening frames of Steve McQueen’s Blitz situate us in the midst of all the horror and chaos of Hitler’s lightning war – his blitzkrieg – on Britain in 1940-41. Bombs rain down on the densely populated streets of London’s East End, while firefighters and air raid patrol (ARP) wardens rush to counter the raging flames, dragging bodies, alive or dead, from the rubble. ... (read more)

Memory 

Potential Films
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11 November 2024
Brooke Timber as Anna and Jessica Chastain as Sylvia (courtesy of Potential Films)
Mexican filmmaker Michel Franco often darkly depicts the complex dynamics within dysfunctional families. That one of the protagonists in his latest film, Memory, has early onset dementia is by no means a red flag that this will be a hackneyed disease-of-the-week movie. Dementia has been a common theme in many recent films (Still Alice [2014] and The Father [2020] being good examples), sometimes to potent effect, though audiences’ resistance to the well-worn subject may be understandable. ... (read more)

Cats & Dogs

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08 November 2024
Pierre Bonnard, Siesta (La Siesta) 1900 (courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest, 1949)
Stepping into the NGV’s Cats & Dogs exhibition at Federation Square, visitors must make a decision. Before them are two arrows directing their path ahead. To the left, a path to dogs; to the right, cats. Immediately, the age-old question is invoked, typically reserved for when the conversation has washed up on first dates: are you a dog or cat person? ... (read more)

Rhinoceros 

fortyfivedownstairs
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04 November 2024
‘Rhinoceros: Ionesco’s world of heady instability’ by Ellie Nielsen

Zinnie Harris’s adaptation of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, in this Spinning Plates production at fortyfivedownstairs, opens on a sombre wasteland setting, bathed in eerie yellow light. In a sudden blaze of colour, a raucous rabble of ordinary characters, rendered extraordinary by Dann Barber’s bold and anarchic costumes, invades the stage. The energy is starkly at odds with Jacob Battista and Dann Barber’s superbly contained and claustrophobic staging. From this heightened theatrical world – part pantomime, part circus – we brace for a wild ride.

... (read more)

Conclave 

British Film Festival
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01 November 2024
Ralph Fiennes in Conclave (British Film Festival)
My favourite Ralph Fiennes performance is in Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener (2005). Fiennes plays a British diplomat stationed in Africa, forced to unravel the conspiracy that led to his wife’s murder. Investigating her death, he comes to know her better than he did when she was alive; it is a backwards love story about honouring legacies we might not fully comprehend. Fiennes’s role as Cardinal-Dean Thomas Lawrence in Edward Berger’s new Vatican thriller Conclave plays out in a similar key. ... (read more)

Kaddish: A Holocaust Memorial Concert 

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra
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01 November 2024
Benjamin Northey conducts Kaddish (photograph by Laura Manariti)
This concert was the fourth, and perhaps most immediately relevant, in a series of concerts conceived over the past six years by artist-in-residence Christopher Latham for the Australian War Memorial. As with the Diggers’ Requiem (2018), Vietnam Requiem (2021), and the Prisoners of War Requiem (2022), Latham has created a narrative to accompany a series of musical works intended to make the history it explored ‘more conscious, identified and understood’. ... (read more)
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