Category: Annie Stafford

Oliver Schermacher remembers: Matthew Lee travelling in a car from Canberra with musician Oliver Shermacher,  when he hears for the first time Hector Berlioz’s SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE, at full blast – bopping in my seat and enthusiastically head-banging to Berlioz’ erratic and colorful music. Mat became intrigued when I described its deranged story and the eye-brow raising background of the piece as a love letter to a woman he had never met. Though Berlioz did stalk and woo her for seven years, finally threatening to over dose on heroin, before she, actress Harriet Smithson, capitulated and married him. (Ultimately, of course,…

TABLE, is a 2013 play by British playwright, Tanya Ronder. David Best builds a table in London somewhere. It is later taken to Tanganyika, by a family member, Sarah, as part of her missionary ‘dowry’. It shares in the ‘adventures’ of this family and in due course returns to South London. A table, six generations. A table that witnesses the dramas and triumphs of the family Best. The play is a neat old-fashioned evening and has the talents of the actors playing 23 different characters over a century or more to bring it passionately to life. Julian Garner is most…

Photo by  Zaina Ahmed NOSFERATU: A SYMPHONY OF HORROR, is a 1922 German Expressionist silent horror film, Directed by F.W, Murnau and starring Max Schreck as vampire Count Orick. The creators were sued by the Bram Stoker family – the author of DRACULA – 1897 – for copyright infringement, which they hadn’t sought to acquire, and this was despite their attempts to disguise the source, by changing names of characters and the narrative. The penalty demanded was that all copies of the film were ordered to be burnt. However, one print had already been distributed around the world. Copies of it…

Photo by Brett Boardman Little Eggs Collective and The Clari Boys present, PINOCCHIO, Composed and Devised by The Company. At The WareHouse, 255 Euston Rd. Alexandria. 25 – 29th September. Little Eggs Collective and The Clari Brothers have devised a mime/movement/dance work with the title of PINOCCHIO. It is part of the Sydney Fringe Festival. Walking on a cold Wednesday night, with threatening rain clouds skimming over the declining Harvest Moon in the late September sky, to a Warehouse building in Euston Rd at the south end of Sydney Park which is in the midst of the cataclysm of West…