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Recent reviews
If you’ve done your homework and you think the answer to the ‘ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything’ is 42, you’d be wrong. You’ve read the wrong book. The actual meaning of life is not to be found in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but ...
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This is Macbeth reimagined as a supernatural-themed action movie for the stage, a high-speed entertainment with explosions and gunplay and plenty of special effects. Macbeth and his fellow Scots scamper about in fatigues, flak jackets, and modern full-dress uniforms, accompanied ...
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Three ‘new’ operatic versions of Hamlet in two years: the time is certainly not ‘out of joint’ for Shakespeare. Italian composer and conductor Franco Faccio’s Amleto was successfully premièred in Genoa in 1865, but then had a disastrous performance at La Scala in Milan in 1871 ...
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Tate Modern excelled itself with its Giacometti retrospective. It’s not easy to take a familiar modern master and return a new and compelling view of his work. Many years ago, MoMA in New York failed the challenge abysmally. They had nothing new to say about the artist and ...
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An account of the life of Emily Dickinson can, like that of a saint, be reduced to its elements of spiritual and physical suffering. She was acutely sensitive, frequently ill, and when she died she left behind thousands of unpublished poems. It would be easy to portray her as a ...
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In this fortnight's Update: Hamlet at Glyndebourne, Vale Jeffrey Tate, The Hispanic Society at the Prado, Cunning Little Vixen and Katja Kabanowa, The SSO plays Harry Potter, Christian Thompson, The Eisteddfod, Silence at Dark Mofo, Andrew Brook at The Substation, NLA Creative Arts Fellowships, and giveaways from Victorian Opera and Black Swan State Theatre Company ...
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Does anyone read Daphne du Maurier (1907–89) these days? An immensely popular novelist for some decades, she was much filmed, for screens large and small, most famously by Alfred Hitchcock, who filmed Jamaica Inn and Rebecca in 1939 and 1940 respectively, and ...
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It is a truism that great novelists rarely make great playwrights; Henry James tried to conquer the boards to disastrous effect with Guy Domville (1895), and writers from Virginia Woolf to James Joyce have failed to translate their genius for interiority to the stage. Charles Dickens, whose ...
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The Sense of an Ending is an intelligent and thought-provoking adaptation of Julian Barnes’s novel of the same name, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize. Director Ritesh Batra (The Lunchbox) and screenwriter Nick Payne (Constellations) have created a sensitive film ...
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In this fortnight's Update: 2017 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, ABR partners with AFTRS, Red Room Poetry Fellowship, Two major appointments at The Sydney Opera House, 2017 Sidney Myer Fund Ceramic Award, Corranderk national tour, Tidelands, Noises Off, Coraline the opera, and giveaways from Queensland Theatre and Studio Canal ...
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