Australian Arts
Bob Dylan
Only in Australia and perhaps only in Sydney, that cradle of the cons and the jailers, the Rum Corps and…
Maggie Smith
And so we look like being able to see live performance again in the two biggest cities in Australia: Sydney…
Clive Owen
A time of plague makes us brood on the culture we share in the absence of personal preference. One person…
Heath Ledger
It’s weird to hear news of artistic life in the midst of Covid. The Sydney Theatre Company has a new…
Nic Denton and Frances O’Connor
As the northern hemisphere, that ambiguous spectral homeland we’re conscious of, starts to open up, it’s easy to be envious…
Diane Lane
It was doubly sad the other night to see Virginia Gay deliver a speech from her Covid-cancelled Cyrano on the…
Thomas Mann
And so Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge is Melbourne’s musical-in- waiting. The show that can only go on when we’re 80…
Charlie Watts
The endless news is of shows locked down as every form of life is locked down in a nation struggling…
Nicole Kidman
And, as even Canberra locks down, so do all the shows. The Melbourne Theatre Company shuts down its production of…
Ernest Hemingway
Entertainment in a public place shrivels as the lockdowns continue. The Australian Ballet has cancelled its Melbourne season, Anna Karenina…
Aden Young
No one has any guarantee of seeing Sigrid Thornton in Lifespan of a Fact with the Sydney Theatre Company now…
Rose Byrne
‘Unemployed at last!’ That wonderful bit of national self-mockery that opens the classic Australian novel Such is Life takes on…
John Mortimer & Leo McKern
What earthly guarantee do we have that live performance is going to be a viable option for Sydney or Melbourne…
The Greeks
What a time of captivity, what a time of plague. The Disney musical Frozen, long delayed by the mammoth Melbourne…
Martin Clunes
Just as the lockdown imprisons the people of Sydney those in Canberra have had the chance to see that exhilaration…
Ethos
A Sydney lockdown on the heels of Melbourne: what price entertainment? It seemed natural as ever to have recourse to…
Singing Shakespeare
Britain is certainly revving up when it comes to culture. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s defiance about social distancing for his new…
Anya Taylor Joy stars in the new Mad Max
It’s funny to reflect how the performing arts, theatre in particular, are a lot stronger when they have a literary…
Andrea Riseborough
National Treasure is a remarkable piece of TV drama, and it looks for a long, bewildering moment like a masterpiece.…
Dylan
Bob Dylan turned 80 the other week. Does that seem to consign not just the vanished twentieth century but the…
Chekhov
The trouble with the performing arts in Melbourne is that you blink and they’re gone. The other week we were…
Macbeth
It’s an extraordinary thing that a director of Bruce Beresford’s reputation should be directing for Melbourne Opera until you remember…
The Dry
It’s a hard thing, harder than it should be, to film a detective story. Is Billy Wilder’s version of Agatha…
Ulysses
If you wanted a college at the University of Melbourne that had no hint of imitation Oxbridge you would turn…
Reese Witherspoon
There are moments when the very idea of live entertainment including its high cultural expression, thrills the soul. On 6…
