2016, the year in preview

In Sydney’s theatres this year, there are many shows to look forwards to – Griffin has the 2015 Griffin Award winner The Turquoise Elephant, Phillip Kavanagh’s Replay, and Finegan Kruckemeyer’s Those Who Fall In Love Like Anchors Dropped Upon The Ocean Floor; Belvoir has a season of general munificence, including Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Jasper Jones, Kit Brookman’s The Great Fire, Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife, Twelfth Night, and the conclusion of Matthew Whittet’s Windmill trilogy in Girl, Asleep; STC has Arcadia, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Golden Age, Almeida’s King Charles III, and 1927’s Golem, as well as Angela Betzien's The Hanging; Bell Shakespeare has Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and another Molière adaptation in The Literati, a co-production with Griffin. There’s a cracker year at Opera Australia with John Bell’s production of Carmen, and Julie Andrews’ My Fair Lady; Sport for Jove’s No End of Blame, Away, and Three Sisters; a new Andrew Bovell play; and (fingers crossed) Squabbalogic’s original musical-theatre take on The Dismissal.

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.

2014, the year in preview

A new year – a fresh new slate of theatre, books, films, events, ideas. A brand new batch of reviews and thoughts, and some rather interesting goings on.

In Sydney’s theatres this year, there are many shows to look forwards to – such as Donna Abela’s Jump for Jordan, Jane Bodie’s Music, and a one-man production of Roald Dahl’s The Witches at Griffin; Hugo Weaving’s Macbeth, Jez Butterworth’s Mojo, adaptations of Cyrano de Bergerac and Children of the Sun, and Sarah Giles’ production of Perplex at Sydney Theatre Company; Once In Royal David’s City, The Glass Menagerie, and The Brothers Wreck at Belvoir; and Damien Ryan’s Henry V, alongside a late-period Romance in The Winter’s Tale from Bell Shakespeare. There’s Sport for Jove’s Twelfth Night and All’s Well That Ends Well at the Seymour Centre (to celebrate Shakey’s 450th birthday); Mark Kilmurry’s Richard III at the Ensemble theatre; the return of The Lion King musical; Black Diggers and The Shadow King at Sydney Festival, as well as a few aces I've got planned.

Very Saturday tea-time: Chasing the magic of Doctor Who

“It all started out as a mild curiosity in the junkyard, and now it’s turned out to be quite a great spirit of adventure.”
– The Doctor, The Sensorites (1964)

A letter to Who,

When you exploded back onto our screens eight years ago, your Northerner’s voice asked us to join you on an adventure. “Do you want to come with me?” you asked us, before issuing a caveat. “Because if you do, then I should warn you – you’re going to see all sorts of things. Ghosts from the past. Aliens from the future. The day the Earth died in a ball of flame. It won’t be quiet, it won’t be safe, and it won’t be calm. But I’ll tell you what it will be: the trip of a lifetime.” We followed you then, thousands upon thousands of us, faithfully, blindly; trusting you with our own lives and our Saturday evenings. We followed you to the end and back again, many times over, and you never let us down. 

Oh, you pretty things: Puberty Blues

I’m not embarrassed to admit I’m quite a fan of the recent television series Puberty Blues. Perhaps for no other reason than because it is so good, because it stands out from the crowd, head and shoulders above the rest of the mediocrity on offer; because it is an engrossing piece of Television. 

Recently seen on Channel Ten, it is an adaptation of the 1979 book by Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey. Written when they were just shy of twenty, Puberty Blues is a brutal and unsanitised portrait of seventies youth culture, a window onto a despairingly misogynistic world where (young) women were something worse than second-class citizens. In an episode of Australian Story from 2002, Kathy Lette describes the boys she grew up with in Cronulla as “[disproving] the theory of evolution. They were kind of evolving into apes. It would have looked much more natural if they squatted on their haunches and groomed each other.” It shows, both in the book and the television series. As an example of the vernacular of the time, especially in the surfing fraternity, the terms for sex were “‘rooting’, ‘tooling’, ‘plugging’, ‘poking’, ‘stabbing’ and ‘meat injecting’… And the terms for women were ‘bush pigs’ or ‘swamp hogs’; if you were very good-looking you got called a ‘glamour maggot’.” But as brutal as the book is in its depiction of the times and the attitudes towards women, it almost seems to be a caricature, the briefest of sketches. Maybe I’m too old or perhaps too cynical, but there is almost a lack of depth to the book which I was surprised at, considering its status as a ‘classic’, an important part of our cultural maturation. It focuses squarely on the (mis)adventures of the kids – whose ages are described as being thirteen in the book, but in the film and television series have been raised to sixteen – and everything life throws at them, with barely a mention of their parents or the adults in their lives.

The television series however, constructs the story as a set of two parallel narratives – that of the kids, and that of their parents – mirroring and contrasting one with the other. Produced by John Edwards and Imogen Banks, the pair responsible for much of the critically acclaimed television drama series’ of the early twenty-first century – The Secret Life of Us, Love My Way, Spirited, Tangle, Offspring – the series does not flinch away from depicting the times as they were, complete with their mannerisms, vocabulary, actions, and values systems, no matter how crude or backward they seem to us now. If anything, it perhaps works to its advantage, not to show us how far we’d like to think we have come, but to show us how far we haven’t. (Full points are also awarded for reintroducing the word ‘moll’ to the vernacular.) But the show belongs to the young cast who seem so uninhibited and natural; there’s an unadorned charm and intrinsic honesty to their performances, something that is definitely not acting so much as Being.