A Premiership at what cost? Indeed, is snaring the feted trophy the be all and end all? The Cutting Cove Football Club, located in a small coastal town, has never won a flag, but it hired a coach known as The General (Syd Brisbane) who has. He took on the job three years ago and maintained that…
Mateship, isolation and mental health are on the line in the darkly comedic Milked. Paul Roberts (William McKenna) and Snowy (Laurence Boxhall) have been friends for years. Now in their early 20s, they live in rural Herefordshire, in the West Midlands of England. Paul has graduated from university and is busily looking for work. He has his…
We are in Poland in 1870. Yentl (Amy Hack) is driven by her desire to study … to learn and understand. Her father teaches at the local Yeshiva (a traditional Jewish educational institution focused on the study of Rabbinic literature). Being a girl, she is not allowed to attend the Yeshiva, nor to study the Torah (the…
Talent. Who has it and who doesn’t? It is a word readily bandied about, but it is fair to say that talent gets down to the eye (and ear) of the beholder. That is the subject at the centre of this absurdist, slapstick musical, first performed Off-Broadway in 1992. It is a rollicking spoof of classic shows…
The second installment in Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 sci-fi novel picks up where Dune (2021) left off. In this chapter, the exiled Duke of House Atreides, Paul (Timothy Chalamet) establishes himself as a leader. You may remember that in Part One, basically the whole House Atreides was massacred by the evil…
Dry Land has much to say about abortion, female friendships and being a teenager, but it takes a long time to say it. It is the brainchild of American playwright Ruby Rae Spiegel. In 2014, Dry Land – her first full length play – premiered Off-Broadway. Spiegel was 21 years old and still a playwriting student at Yale…
Racism comes in many forms and from many quarters and can strike with the speed of a bullet train. That subject is explored in a dramatic and humorous way through a series of anecdotes from the coloured English daughter of West Indian parents. Her mother is an actress and her father a mathematician, who migrated to Australia….
Set in rural Victoria, The Rooster marks a highly imaginative and impactful feature film debut for writer and director Mark Leonard Winter. The double Helpmann Award-winning actor, who featured in Elvis, Balibo and The Dressmaker, drew on personal experience to create something special. The film deals with masculinity, isolation and crisis; and features an introverted…
What is in a word? Everything … for the person around whom the sweeping tale The Dictionary of Lost Words focuses. I speak of Esme Nicoll (Brenna Harding), to whom we are introduced in the year 1886. At the time, she is four years of age and being brought up by her intelligent, decent and caring father,…
A rich array of talent is on display, as love and loss take centre stage in Jonathan Larson’s passion filled musical Rent. Based on Puccini’s opera La boheme, written in 1895 it tells the story of a year in the life of Bohemian friends living in New York City in the late 1980s. In the group…
