Australian classics have been surging onto our stages of late: Matthew Lutton and Tom Wright’s lauded adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock recently enjoyed success in London as well as Australia; Andrew Bovell’s stage version of The Secret River toured the country to critical acclaim ...

‘No one has a monopoly on suffering,’ says Wajdi Wehbe (Camille Salamé), the barrister representing Lebanese Christian mechanic Toni Hanna (Adel Karam) in his law suit against Palestinian Muslim refugee Yasser Abdallah Salameh (Kamel El Basha). Wehbe’s statement is intended to ...

Notwithstanding the riches that follow in the final two acts (Wotan’s Farewell, the Ride of the Valkyries, the Todesverkündigung), Act One of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre offers perhaps the greatest hour of music in German opera. It is ideal for discrete, unstaged performances, and as we know ...

The notion of the sad clown probably has its origins in prehistory; the mockery of pain and sorrow is such an embedded human trait that indigenous cultures around the world embraced it long before it became a trope of commedia dell’arte. Pierrot, with his iconic painted white face ...

Nietzsche was in no doubt: Wagner owed his success to his innate sensuality. The philosopher – most influential of the Wagnerites – began to have reservations about his hero in the mid-1870s, around the time of the first Bayreuth Festival (1876), though he never ...

In this fortnight's Update: What's coming up in ABR Arts, The Dumb Waiter at Chapel off Chapel, The Harp in the South, a film festival tribute to the late Jeanne Moreau, two $20,000 film awards celebrating women in film, a human bodies exhibition visits Australia, the 2018 Our Mob opening night, the Mimir Chamber Music Festival, and a giveaway ...

Curated by Emily Cormack, the 2018 TarraWarra Biennial positions itself as a paean to the liveliness of artistic gesture. The exhibition’s curatorial frame invokes the notion of ‘will’, derived from Friedrich Nietzsche’s infamous notion of the will to power ...