Arts and culture
Skill of the characterisation
Yasmina Reza is one of the most dazzling playwrights alive because she creates sweepingly funny bits of theatre (masterfully translated…
Scrupulous fidelity
Isn’t it fascinating how much we adapt works of literature? 150 years ago someone would have had a fair chance…
Like him or loathe him
It’s cheering to hear very promising reports of Barrie Kosky’s production of Siegfried at Covent Garden suggesting that the Melbourne-born…
Cruelties of popular culture
Ethan Hawke is an extraordinary figure. He has made straightforward Hollywood classics like Training Day but he also comes out…
Deaths in the mind
It’s strange the way certain deaths stay in the mind perhaps because of the fascination and interconnection of the lives…
A daily beauty
It’s fascinating to see that Sharmill are presenting a new Othello from London’s Haymarket from 28 March with David Harewood…
A versatile and virtuouso figure
Well, the Oscars have come and gone and we tend only to remember the anomalies. Julie Andrews winning the Oscar…
Uncanny mutations
Isn’t it odd the way we can start watching a streamer in absolute disgusted disbelief only to discover that we’re…
That glimpse of grandeur
The death of Robert Duvall the other week was a reminder of how long ago some of our cultural landmarks…
A hoard of lost treasure
Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll is the most celebrated of all Australian plays; and this story of the…
Strange and familiar
One of the excitements of seeing Ngaire Dawn Fair in the full trilogy of The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll…
Dark and stormy
The opening gala of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra this year with the renowned pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet seems in every way congruent…
Camp indulgence
Music has the odd quality of being an abstract art as well as one that generates great gulfs and legions…
What Catherine O’Hara gave to cinema
There are actors who dominate the cinema screen, and actors who deepen it. There are stars who are ‘bankable’ and…
Dazzled and satiated
It’s a tumultuous decade or so since The Night Manager burst onto our television screens and a while longer since…
Celluloid nostalgia for lost worlds
There’s a poignancy in turning back the clock to the Fifties and early-Sixties. Everyone remembers Marilyn Monroe singing ‘Happy Birthday,…
Call me Ishmael, or Viola
When To Kill a Mockingbird was published, Flannery O’Connor, the author of those unholy and tragic fables born of intense…
Remembrance of things past
It’s easy to forget the artistic range of people who have died recently. Susie Figgis, in charge of casting the…
Rebels and Rivals
It’s funny how implicated we are in the places from which we take our bearings. Memories of the Lexington-Concord bridge,…
Iron Maiden at 50: how heavy metal became mainstream
The death of the Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne this July, and the huge reaction it provoked worldwide, represented something…
The full range of diversions
Who can say what a world of Christmases will unfold this year? Sir Keir Starmer was knighted for services to…
The sheer scope of his work
When Tom Stoppard, playwright extraordinaire, was at the early height of his fame, with Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons in…
Confused and cumbersome
Anne-Louise Sarks’ production of that dazzling dramatic opera Carmen at Melbourne’s Regent was sometimes lit like a Christmas tree, sometimes…
Pit full of snakes
What a cheering thing it is that David Szalay has won the Booker Prize for Flesh which is a masterpiece…
Give Stellan Skarsgård an Oscar for Sentimental Value
Recently, a friend of mine found himself having a bad day for a reason I now forget. I made a…
