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Andrew Fuhrmann
Andrew Fuhrmann reviews books and theatre. He is currently dance critic for the Age newspaper.
The setting is described in the program as a workplace at the end of the world – but what kind of workplace? Well, imagine that a multinational technology company has bought up Valhalla for warehouse space and a new fulfilment centre. Above and behind the stage is a kind of elongated portal through which we see billowing clouds, purple and pink, shot through with lightning. At centre stage, on a ... (read more)
It’s twilight in a small town in southern Idaho. There’s a housing crisis, widespread poverty, rampant drug addiction, and high levels of crime. Lost jobs, lost souls. Shuttered shops and hollow hearts. The sun is going down on the American dream and in the modest office of a Main Street mortgage broker there’s a man who thinks his problems will be solved by taking on more debt and still mor ... (read more)
The dramatic energies of Uncle Vanya are basically centrifugal. As the play (first produced in 1899) rotates in its unwieldy way, the various characters – all of them dolorous creatures – are driven apart, pushed outward into the dreary wastes of private disappointment. Human relationships are of little consequence in this play; everyone is adrift in his or her own special incapacity. Maybe it ... (read more)
For at least the first half of the twentieth century, Australian playwrights were not held in high regard by their compatriots. Popular opinion was summed up by fictional theatre manager M.J. Field in Frank A. Russell’s novel The Ashes of Achievement (1920):
‘I’ve got a play,’ commenced Philip, plunging.Field jumped from his chair, hands spread out in defence.‘Help!’ he yelped. ‘A ... (read more)
The Moulin Rouge journey has been a complicated one. The show, based on Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 movie and produced by Gerry Ryan’s Global Creatures, opened on Broadway in 2019, when it won a swag of Tony Awards, including Best Musical. In July of that year, a date for the Melbourne première was announced. A year later, of course, the world was turned upside down. Reports of the cast caroming betw ... (read more)
A Buddhist prayer wheel is a cylinder stuffed with sacred mantras and set on a spindle. Turning the cylinder is supposed to produce the same benefit as chanting the texts aloud. For true believers, contemplation of the endless turning of the wheel can be an aid to meditation and a way of drawing nearer to enlightenment. In nineteenth-century Europe, however, the wheel – dismissed by missionaries ... (read more)
Berlin, by Joanna Murray-Smith, is an intense, very wordy, imperfectly plotted, but nonetheless stylish play. ‘Stylish’ is a strange word to describe a play about young love sabotaged by tragic secrets and the legacy of the Holocaust. Shouldn’t it also be ‘heart-breaking’, ‘harrowing’, or at least ‘poignant’? Perhaps, but ‘stylish’ is the right word for a play – a thriller, ... (read more)
Modern mega-farms are like nothing on earth. Imagine a vast black field stretching from horizon to horizon. A driverless tractor glides across the skyline spreading synthetic fertiliser. A cluster of grain towers looms over an empty asphalt parking lot. A row of pig sheds gleams in the distance. The square blot of the manure lagoon simmers in the hot sun. There are no trees. No birds. No mess. Eve ... (read more)
The world evoked by British nature writer and historian Helen Macdonald in her new collection of essays is haunted by no end of unsettling and shrouded presences. The sight of a flock of starlings gives her a shiver of fear. Why? Because in her imagination the flock connects with a mass of refugees. The sight of falcon eggs in an incubator makes her unaccountably upset. Then she remembers that she ... (read more)