Thomas Mullen has shown his ability to deliver engaging crime-genre driven historical fiction in the trilogy which started with 2017’s Darktown. Set in Atlanta in the late 1940s, that series focussed on the first Black policemen in the city as they navigated the city’s racial divide. His new book, The Rumor Game, has some similar…
Rarely does a production come along that deserves the tag of ‘landmark’. In The Dismissal, now on at the Seymour Centre in Sydney, a new standard of Australian devised and created theatre has arrived. Put simply, it’s non-stop enjoyment! Politics may not be everyone’s cup of tea. And the events of 11 November 1975 still…
The reach and influence of Vladimir Putin is breathtaking. In A Very Expensive Poison, writer Lucy Prebble details and explores the assassination of Russian Defector Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 and surmises that Mr Putin most probably authorised the hit. If it weren’t based on a real incident, A Very Expensive Poison may simply…
Australian author Robert Gott is best known for two series of historical crime novels. The first of these features Richard Power, a bumbling Shakespearean actor during World War 2. His latest book Naked Ambition, is contemporary but features at its centre a similar deluded, self-aggrandizing character who seems determined to hoist himself by his own…
A pre-show soundtrack featuring “Barbie Girl” and “Ice Ice Baby” immediately acquaints the audience at La Boite Theatre’s re-imagining of Oscar Wilde’s social satire An Ideal Husband. It is set around 1996, in the lead up to the federal election. Arthur “Artie” Whig (Will Carseldine) has been invited to the national capital for his father to…
Catholic guilt and US conservative politics are given a whack in the Australian premiere of Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning. The play was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It is late at night in Wyoming. Seven years after they graduated from a small Catholic college former students have gathered at…
Ferdinand Mount has had a varied and fascinating career – head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy unit, columnist and former editor of the Times Literary Supplement. So he probably knows a thing or two about politics and journalism. And in his latest novel Making Nice he turns that knowledge with a decidedly satirical eye to the…
Who was responsible for the assassination of Kim Jong-Nam, North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un’s half-brother? And why? Were the two young women convicted of his murder duped into supposedly pranking him when, instead, they were applying a deadly nerve agent known as VX? These questions are answered in the comprehensive and compelling documentary, Assassins. It…
I don’t often get excited about politics. I mean, look at the state of political discourse in this country! But when I see what’s going on in America, I sometimes think maybe we don’t have it so bad. The abyss that is current US politics obviously interests (maybe appals is a better word) late-night talk…
Anyone who enjoyed Jeffrey Archer’s seven volume Clifton Chronicles will lap up his latest rags-to-riches tale which contains all of the familiar elements of his novels. It is his first stand-alone novel in a decade as the Clifton Chronicles has taken up most of his time. There is a virtuous young hero who makes his…
