Category: Kip Williams

PLAYING BEATIE BOW is a Young adult novel published by Ruth Park in 1980. Ruth Park died in 2010 at the age of 93. The book has had a staunch readership in its brief history and is a favourite for a few generations of young Australian readers. Both Kate Mulvany, the adapter of the novel for the theatre and the Director Kip Williams are two of those long affected readers, they declare in the program notes. I have never read the book even though I have had a long connection to most of Ruth Park’s work and so am discovering…

I had just finished my schooling in a traditional Catholic school and was investigating what ‘real’ life was like outside the indoctrinations of that institution, at Teacher’s College and University. I was only 16 turning 17 but even then I had become a cinema addict – escaping real life?, how immaturely ironic, eh? – and although my breeding, of late, was mostly school holiday Disney or Jerry Lewis comedies (except, of course, the free-to-air television repertoire), I took myself off to one of the ‘risqué’ Cinema Art Houses (The Savoy?) I had read about in The Daily Mirror, in Sydney,…

Part way through Act One of the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Tennessee Williams, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, Directed by Kip Williams (and it was probably only twenty minutes or so into the text), I knew that I was having an experience in the theatre that was what I recognise as an experience of Grand Theatre. Watching this production of Kip Williams was the equivalent to me of what I have often experienced in the three hour or more in a Wagner Opera experience – a “Grand Olde Opry” experience, one that through its writing and the endurance…

Sydney Theatre Company presents, A CHEERY SOUL, by Patrick White, in the Drama Theatre, at the Sydney Opera House. 5th November – 15 December. A CHEERY SOUL, is an Australian play by Patrick White, written in 1963. It is a re-visit to the suburb of Sarsaparilla, first introduced to us in Mr White’s 1962 play, THE SEASON AT SARSAPARILLA. Next year is the 40th Anniversary of the Sydney Theatre Company (STC), and A CHEERY SOUL was its first production in 1979, Directed by Jim Sharman, upon the invitation of John Clark and Elizabeth Butcher who were the founders/creative artists of…

Sydney Theatre Company and UBS presents, THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI, by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Tom Wright, at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, Hickson Rd. Walsh Bay. 21 March – 28 April. THE RESISTIBLE OF ARTURO UI, a play by Bertolt Brecht, in a Translation by Tom Wright, with Hugo Weaving, and directed by Kip Williams, playing at the Roslyn Packer Theatre for the Sydney Theatre Company. Brecht at the rise of the Nazis, fled Weimar Germany and lived in Scandinavia. It was in Finland in 1941 he wrote THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI. He soon after found…

Sydney Theatre Company, presents CLOUD NINE, by Caryl Churchill, at Wharf 1, Hickson Rd, Walsh Bay. 1 July – 12 August. Let us begin at the top. This is the BEST production I have seen at the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) for many a long year. Get your self a ticket ASAP. This production of CLOUD NINE, a play by Caryl Churchill, written in 1979, Directed for the STC by Kip Williams (their new Artistic Director), with Matthew Backer, Kate Box, Harry Greenwood, Anita Hegh, Josh McConville, Heather Mitchell and Anthony Taufa  – is an absolute “knock out”. To begin where…