Category: Sandy Gore

  Sydney Theatre Company presents UNDER MILK WOOD. A Play For Voices by Dylan Thomas at the Drama Theatre, Sydney Opera House. UNDER MILK WOOD by Dylan Thomas is A Play For Voices, commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation (B.B.C.), broadcast in 1954 and staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 1956 (later, that year at the New (now Albery) Theatre, London). A film was made in 1971 starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole – Screenplay by Andrew Sinclair. Dylan Thomas had died in 1953 aged 39. When I was studying at NIDA, whilst, with my class, performing the whole of…

Ruminations: THE SEAGULL, UNCLE VANYA, THREE SISTERS and THE CHERRY ORCHARD, the four great plays of Anton Chekhov. THREE SISTERS is my favourite and the greatest in my estimation. UNCLE VANYA is the smaller gem and my next favoured. Both great, mostly, differing only, in the scale of their scenarios. What makes the works of Chekhov a favourite exploration for actors and audiences (especially, if you have the opportunity to see the works regularly, as in Europe, where they are a staple of the theatre ‘diet’) is the endless possibility of interpretation. The fine ambiguity of the Chekhovian text (I…

  Bell Shakespeare presents THE TAMING OF THE SHREW by William Shakespeare at the Playhouse at the Sydney Opera House. “[T]he last scene is altogether disgusting to modern sensibility. No man with any decency of feeling can sit it out in the company of a woman without being extremely ashamed of the lord-of-creation moral implied in the wager and the speech put into the woman’s own mouth. Therefore the play, though still worthy of a complete and efficient representation, would need, even at that, some apology.” – George Bernard Shaw, 1897. My first consciousness of this play is the endearing…