Year: 2009

Arts Radar in association with B Sharp presents A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM by William Shakespeare in the Belvoir St Downstairs Theatre. In his program notes Eamon Flack says he “suspects there’s a production of [A Midsummer Night’s Dream] in Sydney every few months”. It is in fact, for me, the fourth production that I have seen this year. In all my theatre going life it may be the Shakespearean play that I have seen most often. In the case of this production Mr Flack and his company of fellow artists set themselves “the task….. to try to shrink the play’s…

Six Australian writers: Toby Schmitz, Lachlan Philpott, Verity Laughton, Tobsha Learner, Rebecca Clarke and Stephen Sewell. Four Directors: Dean Carey, Anthony Skuse, Katy Alexander, Glenn Fraser. Six actors: Jamie Irvine, Jamie McGregor, Joe Manning, Jennefa Soldatic, Catherine Terracini and Matthew Walker. Collectively this team have organised a night that “began as a bare-bones show for the bare stage. [They] chose ghost stories as a way to get back to the basics of storytelling – sittting ’round the campfire’ in a dark theatre. A number of the finest playwrights in Sydney were approached and asked to conjure up supernatural tales set…

  Company B presents a Malthouse Melbourne production HAPPY DAYS by Samuel Beckett at the Belvoir St Theatre. Samuel Beckett was born in Ireland in 1906. He subsequently lived through the terrible events of the 20th Century: the Irish “problems”, World War I, the boom years of the post war “Roaring Twenties”, the Great Depression, World War II and as a consequence of living in Paris, experiencing the Nazi German invasion, (Beckett said he “preferred France at war to Ireland in peace”), fighting in the French Resistance until forced to return to Ireland. He returned to France in 1947 and…

    The Queensland Symphony Orchestra: Maestro Series presents Freddy Kempf Plays Tchaikovsky at the QPAC Concert Hall, Brisbane. This was my first hearing of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. It was also my first visit to the QPAC Concert Hall. The program began with Peter Sculthorpe’s EARTH CRY, in celebration of his 80th birthday. Originally written in 1988, the version played for this concert was a revised score, prepared in 1999. In the original Sculthorpe wrote “perhaps we now need to attune ourselves to this continent, to listen to the cry of the earth, as the aborigines have done for…

  Queensland Theatre Company & State Theatre Company of South Australia present TOY SYMPHONY by Michael Gow at the Cremorne Theatre, QPAC, Brisbane. TOY SYMPHONY by Michael Gow, glows in my memory from the Belvoir, Company B, production under the direction of Neil Armfield and the luminous performance of Richard Roxburgh as Roland Henning in 2007. So, I was very excited to get to see the play again in a new production. This one under the direction of a relatively new, young director, of growing reputation: Geordie Brookman and with Chris Pitman, a, as before, relatively, young actor seen recently…

  The Australian Ballet present CONCORD at the Sydney Opera House. I personally love Dance. I look forward to going as a respite from words and actors and acting of which I see quite a lot. I see the dance as a relief and delicious rest at seeing another affecting expression of the human condition. Music and bodies launched into spaces in ways that I could not personally contemplate doing. Gaining images that expand my perception of the world around me, help me to perhaps envisage differently. I didn’t see my first ballet/dance company until my early 20’s ( A…