Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

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

Loaded 

Malthouse Theatre
by •
15 May 2023
Danny Ball as Ari in Loaded (photograph by Tamarah Scott).
Christos Tsiolkas’s début novel Loaded (1995), the story of a single, debauched night in the life of nineteen-year-old Greek-Australian queer man, Ari, is no stranger to being given fresh life in new mediums. In 1998, it served as the basis for the film Head On, a breakthrough for director Ana Kokkinos and star Alex Dimitriades, even as its sexual explicitness proved controversial. ... (read more)

Hamnet 

Royal Shakespeare Company
by •
09 May 2023
Hamnet (photograph by Manuel Harlan).
Written prior to the onset of Covid-19, Maggie O’Farrell’s novelistic reimagining of the life and death (in the plague) of Shakespeare’s son was presciently published at the end of March 2020, as the United Kingdom entered lockdown. Three years, and one and a half million sales, later, Hamnet is being made into a film. ... (read more)

The Teachers' Lounge 

German Film Festival
by •
08 May 2023
Leonie Benesch as Frau Carla Nowak in The Teachers' Lounge (courtesy of Palace Films).

Frau Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) stands in front of her class. A student volunteers a solution to the mathematical problem on the board. Carla responds, ‘Is that proof, or an assertion?’ This question will come to haunt Carla later, when it re-emerges in the school’s socio-political context, far messier than mathematics.

... (read more)

November 

Palace Films
by •
08 May 2023
Jean Dujardin as Fred in November (courtesy of Palace Films).
There have been nuanced treatments of the November 2015 Paris attacks, including the docuseries November 3: Attack on Paris (2018), the excellent En thérapie (2021), which deals with post-traumatic stress in a counterterrorist agent who is also a Muslim, and Mikhaël Hers’ sublime human drama Amanda (2018) which looks at the aftermath of terrorism in an understated fashion. ... (read more)

Happy Days 

Melbourne Theatre Company
by •
08 May 2023
Judith Lucy in Happy Days (photograph by Pia Johnson).
A middle-aged woman, Winnie, is buried to her waist in the middle of a mound, amidst a dry, monotonous expanse while the scorching sun beats down. It is one of Beckett’s indelible theatrical images. She finds solace in her handbag, where she uncovers a domestic detritus that affords her the rituals and distractions that help her endure: comb, toothbrush, mirror, hat, music box. ... (read more)

Mahler’s Seventh 

London Symphony Orchestra
by •
08 May 2023
Simon Rattle with the London Symphony Orchestra (photograph by Laura Manariti).
Throughout his long, prolific, and fulfilling musical life, Simon Rattle has never misused time; rather, he has relished it, always with the same energetic sense of purpose and clarity of execution that has made him such an extraordinary musician. ... (read more)

SYNERGY: Tony Tuckson – drawing into painting

by •
05 May 2023
Untitled (Brown and Grey), 1973, TP 200 (courtesy of the Tuckson Estate and Rogue Pop-up Gallery, Sydney)
I bump into two friends at the opening of SYNERGY and we peer into Tony Tuckson’s works, finding allegiances with and hints of other artists: the red, black, and white palette of Philip Guston; Ian Fairweather’s shallow space and densely patterned linework hovering between figuration and abstraction; Cy Twombly’s intricate, repetitive gestures; the torn edge of a calligraphic Robert Motherwell brushstroke in fluid black paint. ... (read more)

Vale Barry Humphries

by •
24 April 2023
Barry Humphries
Barry Humphries loved telling a story concerning a visit he and the painter David Hockney made to an art exhibition held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991. What drew them there was a reconstruction of the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition the Nazis had assembled in Munich in 1937 to help validate and promote their racial ideology. ... (read more)

Beau is Afraid 

Roadshow
by •
24 April 2023
Beau is Afraid (courtesy of Roadshow)
When you wake up from a nightmare, it can feel so vivid, so real – so relevant. But over the following minutes and hours, your brain undertakes the important task of synthesising what your subconscious has subjected you to; it interprets symbols, recognises familiar anxieties, and likely suggests that you refrain from boring everyone you encounter that day with a blow-by-blow account of it all. ... (read more)

Julia 

Sydney Theatre Company
by •
17 April 2023
Justine Clarke as Julia Gillard

First things first, the audience loved it. As Julia Gillard, in a performance that blended naturalism and impersonation, Justine Clarke held the crowd in the palm of her hand. They swooned and sighed to the wholesome depiction of Gillard’s working-class Welsh parents and cackled at the pleasurable jokes made at the expense of Kevin Rudd, Mark Latham, and John Howard.

... (read more)
Page 19 of 114