Peter Craven

Every kind of spectacular effect

9 December 2023 9:00 am

It’s starting to turn into the season to be jolly (or whatever variant you can manage) with the Melbourne Symphony…

The point of perdition

2 December 2023 9:00 am

What will history make of the superior crime stories we seem to be churning out? The late Peter Corris’ Cliff…

Eye-batting nonchalance

25 November 2023 9:00 am

What is it about the Egyptians that bewitches us? Ramses and the Gold of the Pharoahs opened at the Australian…

People of extraordinary glamour

18 November 2023 9:00 am

A refreshing and humbling prospect, in a world where we sometimes imagine cultural coverage gets better, is to revisit the…

Character acting without the character

11 November 2023 9:00 am

Miss Saigon may on the face of it seem like an odd choice of musical for Opera Australia to revive…

How the girls sighed

4 November 2023 9:00 am

You know the year is starting to come to an end when a new production of A Christmas Carol is…

A naive friend

28 October 2023 9:00 am

John le Carré was one of the more extraordinary popular writers of the last half-century (and more) and part of…

Astonishing mistress of song & dance

21 October 2023 9:00 am

The Newsreader has already caught a lot of attention for the way in which it weaves together a strong sense…

This earth-shattering work

14 October 2023 9:00 am

What a strange thing popular culture is. Back in the 1970s a lot of people might have affected to despise…

That extraordinary mutant masterpiece

7 October 2023 9:00 am

It’s been a long time coming, Patricia Cornelius’ My Sister Jill but she’s a playwright whose work demands to be…

His brilliant boggling career

30 September 2023 9:00 am

It’s interesting to see that Mel Gibson, no less, is in the blood and violence TV streamer The Continental which…

Diamond-bright hoot

23 September 2023 9:00 am

Oh to be in London with Barrie Kosky calling the shots in the first part of Wagner’s Ring Cycle Das…

Mermaid out of her depth

16 September 2023 9:00 am

It’s strange the different strands of culture we constantly negotiate. The Rolling Stones bring out a new album and this…

Poets don’t stink

9 September 2023 9:00 am

The Australian Book Review poetry prize is upon us again and it’s worth mentioning that the ABR editor Peter Rose,…

Everybody’s friend

2 September 2023 9:00 am

It was cheering in its way to hear, from the lips of that shrewd urbane man Tony Burke, that 246…

The masterful technique

26 August 2023 9:00 am

Isn’t it weird to hear reports of eminent curators at the British Museum leaving because various priceless artworks (often of…

Bob, Robbie & Robert

19 August 2023 9:00 am

It’s fifty years they tell us since the creation of Utzon’s Opera House and it’s strange to think how this…

Dazzled by her gift

12 August 2023 9:00 am

If you have never seen Bernadette Robinson give yourself a treat and see her current one man show, Divas. It’s…

An air of baffled honesty

5 August 2023 9:00 am

It’s an exciting prospect, Helen Morse in a play by the great Caryl Churchill. The artistic director of the Melbourne…

Magniloquent horror

29 July 2023 9:00 am

The experience of watching Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy, his film with Cate Blanchett as the nun running an orphange…

Kundera’s last laugh

22 July 2023 9:00 am

So now Milan Kundera is gone at the age of 94. It’s easy to forget the tremendous weight, the sheer…

How to build the bomb

15 July 2023 9:00 am

Graham Greene used to say that none of the great literary works he had read as an adult had the…

Keeping Ralph on his toes

8 July 2023 9:00 am

It would have been interesting to hear Barrie Kosky and Kip Williams talk about the theatre on Tuesday night. In…

An icy restraint

1 July 2023 9:00 am

The world has seemed like a procession of deaths lately. Generally, of those in old age. Of all of them,…

Captivating marvels

24 June 2023 9:00 am

It’s fascinating to hear that one of the greater theatre directors we have produced, Neil Armfield, is directing Anthony LaPaglia…