Australian Arts
Magniloquent horror
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
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
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
It would have been interesting to hear Barrie Kosky and Kip Williams talk about the theatre on Tuesday night. In…
An icy restraint
The world has seemed like a procession of deaths lately. Generally, of those in old age. Of all of them,…
Captivating marvels
It’s fascinating to hear that one of the greater theatre directors we have produced, Neil Armfield, is directing Anthony LaPaglia…
Innocent pertness
There are times when anyone might decide to throw in scanning the range of literature and art and music and…
A staggering performance
It would be wrong to belittle the Rembrandt exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria because the emphasis is on…
A campy and colourful role
It’s good to report that the latest revival of The Rocky Horror Show with Jason Donovan as Frank-N-Furter is true…
One kind of masterpiece
It’s strange the world of classics and demi-classics and popular classics we inhabit. Right at the moment there’s the chance…
Strange bedfellows
What a whirlwind the world of the arts can be. Gabrielle Carey who changed forever the image of teenage girlish…
Rattle and HM
It’s funny to think that at the very moment when King Charles was going through his Coronation, pledging service and…
Dragons, broomsticks and whatnot
It was saddening to hear of the death of the poet John Tranter the other week. For those of us…
The preternatural nature of his genius
Is it being a dominion country, a well-heeled colony, that makes this country good at comedy? The death of Barry…
A ravishing sensuousness
What a world of paradox painting confronts us with. The death of John Olsen is a reminder of his stature…
The pity of war
‘My subject is war and the pity of war,’ Wilfred Owen wrote in the poems which Benjamin Britten set to…
Erotic intensity
We think of television – even in this age of a thousand streamers – as something we pig out on…
Searching in vain for The African Queen
What a weird world we inhabit when it comes to popular culture or indeed to any culture high or low.…
Brooding beauty
The prospect of a revival of Rudolf Nureyev’s Don Quixote by the Australian Ballet in Melbourne is a reminder of…
Deathless dag
You need only pick up Tim Robertson’s Reliques/Pomes to know that you’re in the presence of a man with an…
Shining in the mind
How many people have sat watching something stream (or whatever) on television and found themsleves incapable of turning it off…
An ecstatic torment of self-delight
What a week of music. On Thursday night we listened to the Chamber Philharmonia Cologne do Vivaldi’s Four Seasons at…
Shy old charmer
The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra kicks off its 2023 season with a sumptuously ambitious gala concert on the evening of Friday…
Aristocratic panache
Last week saw the streaming of the sixth and final episode of Happy Valley, the Yorkshire policier with the great…
Serious music
The other week this column blithely announced that the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra would be performing live that mighty and mightily…
