Peter Craven

Distinctive ambitions

5 October 2024 9:00 am

It will be fascinating to see the retrospective of work by Jan Senbergs who died this year and who looms…

Maturity and tenderness

28 September 2024 9:00 am

So now it is spring and that carnival season with its promise of Melbourne Cups and AFL grand finals hits…

And then there was the voice

21 September 2024 9:00 am

It was at Cape Liptrap that the call came through. The setting was almost absurdly beautiful, the sea one way…

Tragedy and lighter things

14 September 2024 9:00 am

Noni Hazlehurst’s performance in Daniel Keene’s The Mother is a thing of wonder and terror, overwhelming in its power and…

Purring with cynical affection

7 September 2024 9:00 am

It’s one of those weird paradoxes of history that we think of the Elizabethan era as the zenith of our…

Zany streak of British humour

31 August 2024 9:00 am

The fact that Kip Williams is leaving the Sydney Theatre Company to stage The Picture of Dorian Gray with Sarah…

A man of incomparable beauty

24 August 2024 9:00 am

It was sad to see that great French actor Alain Delon had died the other day. He was a man…

The power of surprise

17 August 2024 9:00 am

You would think that Andrew Bovell, the man who wrote Lantana, would not be subject to the petty indignities of…

The standard of beauty

10 August 2024 9:00 am

Maxim Vengerov is touted as one of the world’s greatest violinists, the kind of musician who can fill Carnegie Hall…

Deranged and fantastic horrors

3 August 2024 9:00 am

For a century King Lear has been thought of as the greatest of Shakespeare’s tragedies and the title role as…

Rescued from the Comanches

27 July 2024 9:00 am

Isn’t it extraordinary how the new-style, super-arty balletic circus has transformed the old child-delighting world of Heffalumps and daring young…

‘Damned spot’ of blood keeps appearing

19 July 2024 11:00 pm

People have always fiddled with Shakespeare. Nahum Tate did not give King Lear a happy ending because he was a…

A masterful magnificence

13 July 2024 9:00 am

Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? culminates the great stretch of American drama that runs from Tennessee Williams’ The…

No hint of vanity

6 July 2024 9:00 am

The new documentary I Am: Celine Dion which just started on Amazon Prime Video and in cinemas begins with Maria…

A weird, dark labyrinth

29 June 2024 9:00 am

What a strange experience it is for an ageing innocent adult to find himself in the plush and state of…

Greatness written all over him

22 June 2024 9:00 am

It was fascinating to see Patti LuPone that immense Broadway musical star interviewed with such palpable reverence by the ABC’s…

This shimmering desert haze

15 June 2024 9:00 am

There’s something inspiring about getting an example of the national talent locking horns with the glory of traditional high culture,…

Phantom of her own career

8 June 2024 9:00 am

Sunset Boulevard is one of the weirdest entertainment phenomena in the history of the world because it starts as a…

An imperfectly articulated plot

1 June 2024 9:00 am

It seemed, on the face of it, a bizarre idea: opera at the Margaret Court arena. And Opera Australia was…

This distorting mirror of cruelty

25 May 2024 9:00 am

Every so often a bit of streamer television comes along and makes you grateful for what the form can achieve…

Obscured by tattiness

18 May 2024 9:00 am

A friend, with a lot more culture than your columnist, used to carry audio recordings of two works on her…

Dark and crooked byways

11 May 2024 9:00 am

Isn’t it strange that the new television, the television of the streamers which has dominated our world since Covid, has…

Music as pasta

4 May 2024 9:00 am

It’s sad to see that Sir Andrew Davis, the former head of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, has died. The man…

The barbarity of this man

27 April 2024 9:00 am

It’s a spectacle a lot of people would kill to see: Hugo Weaving in a Sydney Theatre Company co-production of…

The music of their eloquence

20 April 2024 9:00 am

It was a tweet by the novelist Joyce Carol Oates that warned us PBS, the American public broadcaster, had done…