First up, an admission. My job in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre on 28th April, 1996, in which 35 people were murdered and 20 wounded, was to try to come up with strategies to restore tourism to the area. I had visited the UNESCO world heritage listed site – Australia’s largest and most…
Dear Brother is a joyous celebration of young Aboriginal masculinity and a theatre experience that’s memorable and uplifting. Any preconceptions that the subject matter of young First Nations men grappling with what it means to be a man might be rather grim, should be thrown out because this work, presented by Queensland Theatre, is far…
Ten minutes into Abigail’s Party, I was thinking, “if only the playwright (renowned British scribe Mike Leigh) had killed off all his characters”. Then we wouldn’t have to sit through the rest of this drivel. I was looking around, disinterested in the material. The whole sorry episode seemed simply mindless nonsense. Fast-forward another 90 minutes and I…
On the Sunday sliver of space between the end of Brisbane Festival and the Tony Awards celebration of Broadway being back, Queensland Theatre’s Artistic Director Lee Lewis launched its 2022 season with promise of continued celebration of the resilience of the arts and cultural sector, and the power of great stories told by talented artists….
Speed-the-Plow, by David Mamet was written in 1988 and starred Madonna in its first outing. It concerns two lowly-runged ‘goers’ in the Hollywood hierarchy trying to get further up the ladder with the power to ‘green light’ the production of films. Charlie Fox (Lachy Hulme) brings to his ambitious friend/ally, the corporation favoured Bobby Gould…
Intense and compelling, The King’s Choice is a historical drama is based around Norway’s entry into World War II. Inspired by a book of the same name by Alf R. Jacobsen, it concerns three dramatic days in April 1940. The King of Norway is presented with a monstrous ultimatum from Nazi Germany: surrender or die….
American author TC Boyle has always been interested in the environment and its fragility those who seek to understand and protect it. From his 2000 novel A Friend of the Earth through to 2011’s When the Killing’s Done and 2016’s The Terranauts. Boyle’s latest novel Blue Skies also considers our relationship with the natural world,…
There is a decent yarn to be told in Jasper Jones, but with the story the filmmakers had to work with it didn’t quite shake out that way. Based on the Australian best-selling novel by Craig Silvey, this is the tale of Charlie Bucktin (Levi Miller), a bookish boy of 14 living in a small…
A group of writers sit around a boardroom table trying to come up with a compelling story in Annie Baker’s latest play, The Antipodes, now showing at Red Stitch in Melbourne. Under the watchful eyes of their older mentor in Sandy (Jim Daly) the group of seven – though only one woman, Eleanor (Ngaire Dawn Fair)…
It was inevitable that the runaway success of The Blacklist would spawn imitators. No doubt the attraction of having a ready-made “list” of episodes provided a “lightbulb moment” for many a producer. But where we never get to actually see Raymond Reddington’s “blacklist”, in Blindspot, the clues are literally laid out for you. In the…
