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Tim Byrne
Tim Byrne is a freelance writer and theatre critic for Australian Book Review and Time Out Melbourne. He is currently working on a novel. Tim is also a bookseller and interviewer, running a series of author interviews at Avenue Bookstore. He maintains an arts blog that focuses on theatre, film, and books.
Shakespeare’s world view – his multiplicity and pluralism, all that teeming vitality crashing up against itself – acts like a tabula rasa even when it is precisely the opposite: one can project oneself onto his work not because it is a blank slate but because it contains multitudes. When it comes to his actual opinions, however – his inclinations and proclivities, his personal, political, ... (read more)
While there is still no release date, Nicole Kidman’s production company Blossom Films announced several years ago that they were adapting Andrew Bovell’s play Things I Know to Be True (2016) into a drama series. Given that Bovell’s play Speaking in Tongues (1996) was adapted so successfully into the film Lantana (2001), this could prove the best place for the material. The play as it stands ... (read more)
Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight (1938) surely ranks as the least likely cultural touchstone of our age. A middling melodrama about a suspicious husband, a nervy wife, and some dramatically expedient lost jewels, it made a minor splash on Broadway before being adapted twice for the screen, the second starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer in 1944 (Bergman won her first Oscar in the role). Dec ... (read more)
We can look at the literary canon as our cultural inheritance: flawed and incomplete, maybe, but also a balm and a provocation stretching across the centuries. Part of its value lies in the connections we form between great works, the layers of meaning that build up over time like sediment in rock. American playwright Matthew López engages directly with this notion in his monumental seven-hour pl ... (read more)
Michael Fitzgerald’s new novel, Late, opens with a camera obscura, a direct reference to Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The image is a nifty one – a portrait projected across the Pacific Ocean, as well as across time itself – and it goes some way to signalling the author’s intentions: he wants to create a novel deliberately weighted by the creative works (films, books, ... (read more)
In many ways, William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (almost certainly 1599) is a director’s rather than an actor’s play. While there have been brilliant performances associated with it – from Marlon Brando and John Gielgud to Ben Whishaw and our own Robyn Nevin – it is really the directors who make sense of it on stage, and have moulded its politics to suit the times. John Philip Kemble an ... (read more)
Despite their proliferation, celebrity memoirs often seem incapable of justifying their own existence: a string of carefully curated anecdotes woven together to approximate a life already lived in the glare of the media. Perhaps because actors are on the one hand concealed by the roles they play, and on the other exposed to the prying eyes of the public, their autobiographies tend to inhabit a par ... (read more)
Given the success of the film adaptation of his previous play, The Father (2020), with an Academy Award-winning lead performance from Anthony Hopkins and a slew of nominations for himself, it seems only natural that writer–director Florian Zeller should turn to another in his trilogy of plays, The Son, for his next film project. (Zeller’s play, Le Fils, had its première in Paris in 2018.) Co- ... (read more)
The degazetted former township of Wittenoom, 1,420 kilometres north-north-east of Perth, stands like a dark shadow on the lungs of Australian mining, less an isolated blight than a synecdoche for the exploitation and avarice of the industry as a whole. It was named by Lang Hancock himself, created in 1947 by his company Australian Blue Asbestos Pty Ltd, and was directly responsible for the death o ... (read more)