Arts and culture
Feast of epiphanies
January 6, the end of the twelve days of Christmas and the Feast of the Epiphany when the three wise…
I, Spy
Is the new year a time to reflect on the misjudgments of a life spent opining? Thirty years ago, when…
The intensity of Christmas
What a box of contradictions Christmas is. There’s the quest for presents – which can get urgent and exhilarated in…
Howdy, pardner
Someone told me the new TV streamer The English had a weird resemblance to Cormac McCarthy who has just published…
And introducing Michael Caine
It was the night of the Victorian election that might have seen Daniel Andrews fall like Lucifer never to rise…
Firefighters of bounty
Dickens’ A Christmas Carol has been with us for as long as we can remember. The story of the unlovely…
Minimalist but highly imaginative
If you live in the suburb of Hawthorn in the midst of all that leafy greenness, in the federal seat…
A lustre that is blinding
Does Milly Alcock find her characters inside herself or does she sketch them from outside? ‘It’s both,’ she says. ‘You…
Theatre of the soul
Whatever you think of the question of the Voice it was fascinating to hear Noel Pearson, that most formidable and…
Grace and lucidity
The news of Carmen Callil’s death last week shocked the literary world even though it was expected. She made an…
One night in a Gentlemen’s Club
How fascinating it is to see that Australia’s Brendan Cowell is playing John Proctor in the new English National Theatre…
Swerves of warmth and coolness
One of the great things about the Australian Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet is that the kids love it. Even the…
A sapphic rom-com not to be missed
What a relief it is that Virginia Gay’s adaptation of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac should finally have opened in Sarah…
Footy versus ballet?
All the different aspects of a culture collide and interconnect. Melbourne is the undisputed capital of Australian rules football (which…
Eye of a genius
In a week dominated by the death of the Queen it’s a strange thing that Jean-Luc Godard, the man who…
A god of fury and destruction
David Hare is the most eminent British dramatist of the generation that includes the man we have to learn to…
Just yesterday
The death of Mikhail Gorbachev last week transcended politics because it was a reminder of how the culture of the…
Where art and pleasure collide
The morality of art always seems like such a simple thing. The Greeks want back the so-called Elgin Marbles pilfered…
His lightning art
The combinations and permutations of different forms of artistic activity are always weird. Stacks of people will want to see…
Don’t be routine
It’s a marvellous thing that the great Indian conductor Zubin Mehta will be wielding the baton for that illustrious group…
Trash and treasure
It’s cheering to see that the new head of Melbourne’s Arts Centre is Karen Quinlan. For years now, she has…
Primeval Voice
So, Archie Roach is dead at 66. It’s hard to read of the artistic triumphs and the personal catastrophes without…
Neighbours no more
It’s cheering to hear such good reports of the performance of Mahler’s second symphony by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under…
Call of the wild
It’s fascinating to hear that Warwick Thornton––who took the world by storm some years ago with that knockout indigenous film…
Genesis of a Dreamcoat
Just the other day came the announcement that a new production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat was to…
