“This is the way the world ends; this is the way the world ends.” The final line in August: Osage County, taken from a poem by T S Eliot, is an apt conclusion to this damning portrayal of American culture and history. Considered one of the great 21st Century American plays, August: Osage County bares…
Fans of the ‘bard of Avon’ will be delighted by the New Theatre’s latest offering, Shakespeare In Love. This stage version of the 1998 motion picture is written by Lee Hall, based on the original screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. The story begins with Will Shakespeare suffering writers block as he tries to…
Many a prairie oyster has been consumed at Buckingham Palace over the years. Perhaps done none better than by the popular matriarch of the Windsors, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother. With a penchant for a lunchtime gin and Dubonnet, she was a real advocate for ‘drinkypoos’ in the Royal household. This, and other ‘secrets’ of…
Watching characters on stage whose lives are steeped in suffering, sadness, loneliness, and despair can be one of life’s great therapies. There’s a strange comfort in witnessing their struggles, knowing that our own lives, by comparison, are far less tumultuous. When we leave the theatre, we may find ourselves reinvigorated, inspired, even uplifted. Uncle Vanya,…
Family secrets, past love, memory loss and addiction are just some of the issues explored in Sunset Strip, an Australian play by Suzie Miller, now on at the New Theatre. On the upside, this drama/comedy provides hope, inspiration and renewal. The setting is in the home of Ray (Vincent Melton), located in a rural community…
A journey through art, music, love and the finer things in life is now on at the Ensemble Theatre. Master Class is an illuminating look at the interesting life and career of Maria Callas, arguably the greatest soprano of the twentieth century. The scene is the Julliard School of the Arts in the 1970’s. Ageing…
Something revealed in the opening scene of INK was Rupert Murdoch’s quandary about whether to dine on lobster or a very rare scotch fillet. With a taste for things rare and bloody, it seems an appropriate metaphor for how Rupert does business. Later in the play he prophetically states to his new editor “Create an…
Sometimes we forget how we used to get the news. Before social media and before the internet. Even before television and cinema newsreels. There were…newspapers! And the holy grail for a journalist was for their story to dominate the front page. Now playing at the New Theatre, The Front Page is a fast-paced: story. Written…
For those who like the unconventional, Sophia = (Wisdom): The Cliffs is heaven-sent. Promoted as “Part dada, slapstick comedy, part philosophical vaudeville interrogation into the human psyche and fully a production of the true avant-garde”. I couldn’t have put together a better word-salad myself. Written by American playwright Richard Foreman, the play falls into a…
A formulaic and predictable rom-com both set in and shot around Sydney, Anyone But You taps into the familiar tropes of the genre without adding anything particularly fresh or original. A meet-cute between ambivalent law student Bea (Sydney Sweeney) and stock broker Ben (Glenn Powell) in a coffee shop leads to a one-night stand, which…
