Arts and culture
Last days, spare room
In a world of international horrors and hopes it is weird to have one of the weirdest true-life crime stories…
Russians greats
The house was awash with the Russians this week – first because someone was reading George Saunders’ A Swim in…
Dial Q for Cold Case
By the time this is published, your columnist will have seen the students of the National Theatre perform their chosen…
A deadly sweetness
One of the greatest documentary filmmakers who ever lived died last week at the age of 97. He is the…
Craggy man of integrity
Sometimes you’re just too clapped out to attend the most sparkling bit of theatre and so it was for your…
In ambiguity, Tancredi Di Carcaci finds inspiration
The narratives we tell ourselves about the past are hardly set in stone. It’s in this ambiguity where Tancredi Di…
Beautifully played
Who would have thought? The arena concert version of Les Miserables, Claude Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s sung-through extravaganza is…
Dark lowering road
Bill Henson, the greatest Australian photographer, has a show at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery at 6pm Friday 16 May. It’s…
A need for abasement
We sometimes forget how much opera provides a captivating alternative to classic drama but this was written all over Opera…
A wonder to behold
The National Gallery has been gifted Edvard Munch’s Man with Horse and its acquisition brings to mind James Mollison, the…
A passable Antipodean
Isn’t it strange the way the popular and high art aspects of our culture keep connecting and intersecting. A friend…
The way the imagination works
Easter was almost on us when the suggestion came. There was talk of a new Narnia film underway and of…
The zenith of art
Last week your columnist cut a paragraph stating that the original Melbourne Higgins in My Fair Lady, Robin Bailey, and…
Unsurpassable
It’s a weird connection but they say Donald Trump is devoted to his presidential predecessor Andrew Jackson who was popular…
What really scares people about Adolescence
Two books I read in my teens made me want to be a writer. One, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, appeared when…
Intensely engaging
The Australian National Academy of Music gala performance on Friday 21 March was dazzling with guest conductor Asher Fisch leading…
Theatre vultures will kill
Having a sportswriter father is no excuse. The young man was tall, long fair-haired with a hat. ‘What do you…
Netflix’s Adolescence is far from perfect
According to one gushing review, Netflix’s Adolescence is the ‘most brilliant TV drama in years’. And that verdict is at…
Is ‘good enough’ all we want from TV?
For those people with a therapeutic bent of mind, the phrase ‘good enough’ has an almost magical power. It says:…
What The Leopard is really about
Written by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa at the end of his life in the late 1950s, it is a novel…
Never mind the cracks
If you wanted confirmation that the world can change dramatically you need only remember the Berlin Wall coming down in…
How good titles are chosen
Liszt’s compositions tend to have descriptive titles — “Wild Chase;” “Dreams of Love” — whereas Chopin avoided titles. Thomas Wentworth…
Devotion and betrayals
There is a Roman saying, ‘What the barbarians started the Barberinis completed’ with reference to one of the great dynastic…
No Other Land isn’t what it seems
The Oscars, an institution that claims to celebrate artistic excellence, this week played a leading role in a sophisticated and…
Netflix’s ‘With Love, Meghan’ is surreally dull
My experience of Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex and Muchness of Montecito, has I imagine been quite a common one.…
