2013, the year in preview

I started this blog eleven months ago as a way to record my thoughts and engagement with the various pieces of theatre I saw, with the books I read and the films I saw, the things I found myself pursuing and enjoying. Now, at the start of 2013, I thought I’d take a moment to preview the year ahead, to see what’s on the horizon, if we can see that far.

On Sydney’s stages this year, Griffin – with their endearingly tiny diamond-shaped stage – have an all-Australian season, the Sydney Theatre Company have what could just be their best season that I can remember, Belvoir continues their exploration both Upstairs (with a season encapsulated the theme of ‘flight’) and Downstairs, while Bell Shakespeare are offering another dose of their house-style – classic plays with a distinctly Australian voice. There are many shows to look forwards to this year, such as Van Badham’s The Bull, the Moon and the Coronet of Stars, Lally Katz’s Return To Earth and Vivienne Walshe’s This Is Where We Live at Griffin; Matthew Whittet’s School Dance, a theatrical interpretation of Storm Boy, and Tom Stoppard’s classic Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at STC; Peter Pan, Angels In America, Persona, This Heaven, and Small and Tired at Belvoir; and John Bell as Falstaff in Henry 4, and an early-period mistaken-identity gem in The Comedy of Errors from Bell Shakespeare.

There are already a dozen or so books on my ‘to read’ list for this year, including a smattering of Peter Carey, Kate Grenville and Tracy Chevalier, as well as this year’s Vogel Award winner and Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelists Award winners when they are announced in May, not to mention anything the Sydney Writers’ Festival offers up. And a new Neil Gaiman book appears mid-year…

In the cinema this year, after the disappointing holiday offerings of The Hobbit and Les Misérables, the candle of hope is kept alive by the prospects of Ang Lee’s Life Of Pi, Joe Wright’s sumptuous Anna Karenina, Tom Tykwer and the Wachowski siblings’ Cloud Atlas, not to mention Baz Luhrmann’s eagerly anticipated The Great Gatsby.

Fingers crossed.