ABR Arts Performing Arts
Opera Australia’s spring season in Melbourne opened with two masterpieces by Verdi in his bicentennial year. It was a decidedly rocky pairing.
La Fura dels Baus’s production of Un Ballo in Maschera was first seen in Sydney in January. La Fura is open about its intentions. Assistant director Valenti ...
There was a real buzz in the foyer of Her Majesty’s last night before the Victorian Opera’s latest offering. At last Melbourne was seeing John Adams’s masterly opera Nixon in China, first performed in Houston twenty-six years ago and later seen in Adelaide, during the 1992 Festival.
...Andrew Fuhrmann reviews A Clockwork Orange, directed by Alexandra Spencer-Jones
You’ve got to admire the bolshie great yarbles of young British company Action to the Word. It must have taken much courage and not a little jejune presumption to dream of touring Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) to such capital city main-stage venues as Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre, QPAC in Brisbane, and Canberra’s Theatre Centre. Such confidence is difficult to understand. This new production is only marginally more advanced than an average – very average – work of student theatre, or at best a fringe festival experiment.
... (read more)Stephen Sewell’s sixth play, Hate, first performed in 1988 and written with a bicentennial commission, is a monster of ambition. It is a play that seems to swallow whole the Australian story since 1788 and represent a family tragedy, one steeped in the ritual violence of an Ancient Greek myth or a perverted Easter drama.
...Was there ever an Australian poet who drank so deep of that turbid spring, enthousiasmos, Aristotelian enthusiasm, as Dorothy Porter? From the grungy vitality of her early collections, to the exuberant embrace of popular genre fiction in her five verse novels, to the high, passionate tone of her lyrics, libretti, and later collections, she was never less than ...
How is it that the sordid ‘familial romance’ of Laius, Jocasta, and Oedipus, or ‘daddy, mommy, and me’, came so completely to define the concept of desire in the modern West? For Deleuze and Guattari, authors of The Anti-Oedipus, that is the true sphinxian riddle at the heart of the Oedipus materials, the myth, and its subsequent interpretations from Sophocles to Freud and beyond. Forty years after the publication of their famous broadside against mainstream Freudian psychoanalysis, and notwithstanding a significant and growing body of sceptical opinion, the Oedipal complex is still widely regarded as humanity’s universal history. In fact, argue Deleuze and Guattari, it is nothing of the sort. Rather, they say, Oedipal desire is an historically contingent, socio-cultural consequence of capitalism. When psychoanalysts, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, ethnologists, and even dramatists reach for an Oedipalised analysis of social relations, they not only violently disfigure our understanding of desire, but also reinforce and normalise the omnivorous progress of capitalism and its patriarchal social forms.
... (read more)‘An admired talent for the theatre / Even when I was small / A man born of the stage you see / Histrionic / Setting snares even when very little.’ Such is the epigraph to Thomas Bernhard’s The Histrionic (Der Theatermacher), drawn from the play’s principal character, the megalomaniacal Bruscon. The image of the snare, or trap, is a common one in the work of Bernhard, typically figuring a moment of exposure: the individual left open by falsehood or deceit to the calumny of the world.
... (read more)Be warned: what follows is in the nature of a rave. It’s not often one is tempted to weep with gratitude for how the theatre has brought a play to such magisterial life that one can’t imagine ever wanting to see it again – let alone supposing it could be done better. If you’re tired of over-smart productions doing vulgar, opportunistic things with great plays, then Ariette Taylor’s recent production of Chekhov’s Ivanov at fortyfivedownstairs (that’s 45 Flinders Lane) was the place to be. It was an occasion of unalloyed joy and celebration.
... (read more)John Rickard reviews productions of ‘The Ham Funeral’ and ‘Journal of the Plague Year’
Patrick White had rather more success than Henry James with his plays – though that is not saying much. James’s attempt in the 1890s to conquer the London stage was a theatrical and personal disaster, but has, remarkably, provoked two recent novels, Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author. The plays were no great loss, and it was to our ultimate benefit that James returned his creative energy to the novel.
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