Category: Nick Schlieper

  Alfred Hitchcock had decided he needed a change of style and, particularly, after the twisted Freudian themes and motifs of his then disparaged VERTIGO – released in 1958 (it, belatedly has become  regarded as a Hitchcockian Masterpiece) – he began a treatment of THE WRECK OF THE MARY DEARE, based on a novel by Hammond Innes with screenwriter Ernest Lehman. It didn’t work out. They quit on it. Being under contract they had to produce something for M.G.M. , so the Cold War suspense thriller, romantic-comedy, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, gradually crystallised. It seems that Hitchcock had collected in his…

PACKER AND SONS is a new Australian play by Tommy Murphy. It is a play that focuses on the men of the Packer dynasty. Sir Frank, Kerry, Clyde and James. We meet Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch – another Australian power merchant family. And wheeler-dealer Jodie Rich – a failed power interloper. No women appear in this two and a half hour saga – is it that their invisibility or silence is a tacit wink that they are consenting agents to the world about them? Silence is Consent? On a bare stage, Design, Set and Costume, by Romaine Harper, supported peripherally…

THE REAL THING, is a play by Tom Stoppard, from the approximate middle period of his output – 1982. Prior to this it was the intellectual brilliance of his word play and juggling of various viewpoints that gave his work the effervescence of the best cold champagne that money could buy. Exhilarating nights in the theatre that made one feel smarter and wittier than one had suspected, known, of oneself ever being: ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD (1968); JUMPERS (1972); TRAVESTIES (1976). THE REAL THING, had all the wit as usual, but at its centre it had, as well, a…

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…

MICHAEL CASSEL GROUP and NULLARBOR PRODUCTIONS in association with MGM STAGE present PRISCILLA Queen of the Desert. Book by Stephan Elliott and Allan Scott, based on the latent Image/Specific Films, at the Capitol Theatre, Haymarket, Sydney. PRISCILLA – Queen of the Desert – The Musical is now at the Capitol Theatre on a 10th Anniversary return run – last time at the Lyric Theatre. Since that beginning says Simon Phillips, the Director: Our own bus has done a macrocosmic version of the road trip. PRISCILLA is the first Australian musical to conquer the two biggest showbiz smokes, Broadway and the…

  Sydney Theatre Company present, CHIMERICA, by Lucy Kirkwood, in the Roslyn Packer Theatre, Walsh Bay. 28 February – 1 April. CHIMERICA, is a three hour (plus interval) play of epic scale, written by Lucy Kirkwood, that premiered at the Almeida Theatre, in London, in 2013. The play is epic in length, epic in production values, epic in cast, and best of all, epic in ideas. On a virtual empty stage, with the action of a revolve stage, the production swirls into that space creating locations for some 39 scenes, that are, at different times, naturalistic, emblematic (Brechtian?), surreal. The…