Distinctive ambitions
It will be fascinating to see the retrospective of work by Jan Senbergs who died this year and who looms…
Maturity and tenderness
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
It was at Cape Liptrap that the call came through. The setting was almost absurdly beautiful, the sea one way…
Tragedy and lighter things
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
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
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
It was sad to see that great French actor Alain Delon had died the other day. He was a man…
The power of surprise
You would think that Andrew Bovell, the man who wrote Lantana, would not be subject to the petty indignities of…
The standard of beauty
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
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
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
People have always fiddled with Shakespeare. Nahum Tate did not give King Lear a happy ending because he was a…
A masterful magnificence
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
The new documentary I Am: Celine Dion which just started on Amazon Prime Video and in cinemas begins with Maria…
A weird, dark labyrinth
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
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
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
Sunset Boulevard is one of the weirdest entertainment phenomena in the history of the world because it starts as a…
An imperfectly articulated plot
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
Every so often a bit of streamer television comes along and makes you grateful for what the form can achieve…
Obscured by tattiness
A friend, with a lot more culture than your columnist, used to carry audio recordings of two works on her…
Dark and crooked byways
Isn’t it strange that the new television, the television of the streamers which has dominated our world since Covid, has…
Music as pasta
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
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
It was a tweet by the novelist Joyce Carol Oates that warned us PBS, the American public broadcaster, had done…
