The past and the present collide in a story that involves reframing a tainted history. We are in Gippsland in the 1840s and a white woman is discovered near death, washed up on a beach. Just what happened to her remains the stuff of myths, but she is said to have been rescued by and…
In a crucial scene in Anatomy of a Fall, Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) tells her son, “Everything you hear in the trial it’s just… it’s twisted. It wasn’t like that.” Indeed, a lot about Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winning drama isn’t what it seems. This multi-layered film presents a complex narrative web that invites its…
Australian rural crime author Adrian Hyland brought character Jesse Redpath from the red outback of Northern Territory to a tinder-dry Victorian country town in Canticle Creek. There was a raging bushfire in the climax to Canticle Creek but when Hyland’s follow-up The Wiregrass opens, the weather could not be more different. Jesse finds herself working…
A Midnight Visit is an award-winning immersive live theatre show that, having previously been unleashed in Sydney, Perth and Melbourne, has recently resurrected in Brisbane. Inspired by the life and works of Edgar Allen Poe, the magnificently macabre multi-room experience, invites its guests to explore a dark dream world of gothic thrills, obsession, decadence and…
In terms of views and images, Jupiter Ascending is a spectacle with an impressive space footage, sometimes rousing action sequences and titillating extraterrestrial fantasies. But just as a book of Jack Vance, it really doesn’t make any sense in the beginning. The difference is that while reading that book of Vance, the intended message becomes…
Scottish author Graeme Macrae Burnet loves playing meta-textual games. And that’s patently evident in his trilogy of crime novels featuring French police detective Geroges Gorski, of which A Case of Matricide is the third and last. The books are purportedly written over forty years ago by a little known French author Raymond Brunet and merely…
Olivia Ruggiero is talented. No doubt about it. She is operatic and she is adept at musical theatre, but at times there is a struggle between the two. I noted that very early on in Broadway Diva, when she sang a medley of show tunes. The operatic tended to overwhelm what I would call traditional musical theatre and…
From cabaret to comedy, music to dance, theatre to the visual arts and a lot more, diversity is the key to the 2025 Melbourne Fringe Festival. That was on display at the opening night gala at the Capitol Theatre, which gave us a taste of the almost 500-strong show lineup in this, the festival’s 43rd…
This exhilarating hip-hop musical from Queensland Theatre is a huge crowd-pleaser, ending the year of productions on a high note. Set immediately post-Vietnam predominantly in a refugee camp in Arkansas, U.S.A., with flashbacks to Saigon, Vietgone is written by Qui Nguyen (who’s since gone on to write for Disney animation projects since penning this in…
Over the years, a number of well-known names – like John Hurt and Harold Pinter – have performed Samuel Beckett’s one-person, one-act play, Krapp’s Last Tape. Now the indefatigable Max Gillies joins them I’m a Gillies fan. He certainly doesn’t let you down as he takes on the persona of a 69-year-old man who looks…
