Slumdog millionaires: National Theatre’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (NTLive)

Better known for his political plays, British playwright David Hare has turned to Katherine Boo’s account of life under a Mumbai flight path in Behind the Beautiful Forevers to create an epic piece of theatre, whose scale and integrity is clearly defined at the outset and maintained throughout. And while its story is compelling, it lacks the strong emotional pull which is so present in some of Hare’s other plays, the hook which would make us care more about the plight of these characters, these people.

Sea-fairing: National Theatre’s Treasure Island (NTLive)

I remember reading Treasure Island when I was younger, shivering in excitement as Long John Silver swept the crew of the Hispaniola into his murky plans. I remember Captain Flint (Silver’s parrot), Jim Hawkins the cabin-boy, the blind man tap-tapping his cane in the darkness, the dreaded black spot, finding the wild man Ben Gunn on the island… But strangely enough, I don’t really remember the story at all. More recently, I read Andrew Motion’s Silver, the 'return to Treasure Island', but that felt more like seeing something familiar refracted through an endless mirror and trying to piece it all back together. But here, in this production by London’s National Theatre, Treasure Island springs into full-blooded thrilling life, and is much darker and far more mercurial than I ever remember it.

2015, the year in preview

In Sydney’s theatres this year, there are many shows to look forwards to – Masquerade, MinusOneSister, and 2014 Griffin Award winner The Bleeding Tree at Griffin; Beckett, Chekhov, Dorfman, Woolf, Shakespeare, Shaw, and new plays from Melissa Bubnic and Kylie Coolwell at Sydney Theatre Company; Radiance, Mother Courage, Samson, Mortido and Ivanov at Belvoir; and a year of staples – Hamlet, The Tempest, As You Like It – from Bell Shakespeare. There’s Sport for Jove’s Edward II; The ANZAC Project at the Ensemble theatre; James Thierrée’s Tabac Rouge, Falling Through Clouds, Kiss and Cry, and The Kitchen at the Sydney Festival, as well as the David Byrne/Fatboy Slim musical Here Lies Love for Vivid, Rocky Horror Show’s long awaited return, the Australian premiere of Matilda the musical, and several shows interstate.

The kindness of strangers: Young Vic’s A Streetcar Named Desire (NTLive)

Director Benedict Andrews needs no introduction to Sydney audiences. Over the past seven years, his productions have garnered considerable critical and popular acclaim, and not without detractors. Known for his striking theatricality as much as for his reliance upon certain stock examples of stagecraft – glass boxes, confetti falling from the ceiling, loud noises or music, bodily fluids (blood, urine, faeces, vomit, spit) being spread across the set, gratuitous nudity and/or drug-taking – it has almost become predicable as to what you’d expect to encounter in a production directed by Andrews. But in his recent production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire for London’s Young Vic, currently screening in cinemas as part of the National Theatre Live program, it is the distinct lack of these effects which makes it such an engrossing and relatively ‘straight’ interpretation of Williams’ play. This Streetcar is visceral, dangerous, strangely seductive and undeniably compelling. 

Pandemonium: National Theatre's Frankenstein (NTLive)

We all know Frankenstein’s monster – the block head, the shock of dark hair on its flat top, the bolts in the neck, the ill-fitting clothes, the immense iron shoe-clad feet, the lumbering gait, arms outstretched. We erroneously call this monstrosity ‘Frankenstein,’ not realising that is actually the name of the scientist who created him; the creature is, in fact, unnamed, although as this production illustrates so clearly, both creature and scientist are two halves of one being – creator and created – thus the title of Frankenstein being applicable to both man and creature. But underneath the myth and horror-appropriation of the story is Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, and this production – created for London’s National Theatre in 2011 – springs forth from Shelley’s novel into full-blooded life, first upon the stage and now upon cinema screens as part of the popular National Theatre Live program.

First published in January 1818 when Mary Shelley was twenty years old and pregnant herself, the novel is often credited as the first work of science-fiction. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the age of science was beginning – surgeons and anatomists were plumbing the human body for its secrets and workings, the discovery of electricity was almost visible on the horizon, and the modern world was about to explode in all its hulking smoking burning glory into full being through the Industrial Revolution. There was much less of a distinction between art and science as we know them today, and for many writers and thinkers of the time, the two were intertwined. At the heart of Shelley’s Frankenstein is not Hollywood’s idea of horror, but a very morbid and human fear of being born.