Furious Mattress is a vastly disconcerting experience. I walked out of it more than usually unsure what I thought. The last time I felt something like this aesthetic dizziness was when I went to see Richard Maxwell’s New York City Players at the 2005 Melbourne Festival. Good Samaritans was a play which my conscious mind told me was of execrable banality, but which alerted something deeper – an
Archives for “malthouse”
After months of fevered speculation, the Malthouse Theatre announced today that Marion Potts, currently Bell Shakespeare's associate artistic director, will be its new artistic director. She replaces Michael Kantor, who leaves at the end of this year.With last year's appointment of Ralph Myers as the successor to Neil Armfield at Company B, this completes the picture of what the theatre culture
The melancholy of modernityThere’s a poignancy in looking down over a city from a plane that in certain moods can be overwhelming. The structures that dominate and shape our lives are suddenly rendered minature by perspective and – especially at night, when the lights give it a shimmering unity – a city seems a live creature, a single organism that pulses and consumes and excretes. A parasitic
I’ve often pondered the astounding ability of puppets to generate intense emotional responses. How is it possible that we can identify so fiercely with an overtly unrealistic object made of sticks and paper?The power of animation plumbs our imaginative humanity. It's a simple and crude device that every child exploits in play, but it enacts a totemic magic, an ancient ability to invest an object
Hot off the Malthouse's press machine: Michael Kantor today announced that he will depart the Malthouse at the end of 2010, after six years as artistic director and CEO of the company. He'll be leaving to pursue other opportunities as a freelance director."Theatre is the most malleable and mercurial of artistic forms, and needs to constantly reinvent itself to stay alive and relevant," said
The lost child is an iconic, even obsessive, figure in Australian folklore, the subject of song, story and painting. Frederick McCubbin’s 1886 painting Lost encapsulates the myth: a young girl stands hesitantly, almost invisibly, in bushland, on the verge of being swallowed by the trees. The story focused a settler’s anxiety in a land which refused to obey the known laws of European agriculture,
Yes, Ms TN has been whinging heroically this past fortnight, but that hasn't stopped her getting out to the theatre. Writing about it has been a different matter. But this morning she awoke from her slumber, brutally thrust aside the heap of used tissues that had accumulated overnight, and cried out: "Now or never!" Or something of the sort. (Witnesses differ: another report claims she actually
* I forgot yesterday to mention James Waites's continuing meditations on the Bacchanalian qualities in Barrie Kosky's work, including the recent production of Poppea. In the course of which he reveals that Kosky is unlikely to be working in Australia in the future, as his job with Berlin's Komische Oper looms closer. Which is sad news for us.* The Malthouse production of Optimism finished its
(Note: there are spoilers in this review).Written in 1995, David Harrower’s first play, Knives in Hens, already has the status of a modern classic. This is no empty claim. It’s an extraordinary play: radical in its language, profound in its thought, and utterly original.Set in an imaginary pre-industrial landscape, it follows a deeply strange love triangle between three characters: a ploughman,
Over the past few days. Ms TN and the man to whom she's a spectacularly Bad Wife (although, of course, a deeply empathic partner and awesome literary colleague) have been discussing whether to revisit Samuel Beckett's Happy Days, which both of us saw on opening night at the Malthouse. It ended up being a peculiarly Kierkegaardian dialogue."I think," said my beloved, "that I'd prefer to stay home.
A busily theatrical weekend is looming in the Keene/Croggon household. To begin with, those who bemoan that Daniel Keene's work is never done in Melbourne have a chance for a bit of catch-up: the Dog Theatre in Footscray, under the direction of the dauntless Matt Scholten, are putting on The Cove, a season of eight short works, over the next four weeks. Keene is of course one of Australia's most
Slaved By The BellThe Beckett estate seem to have relaxed a little over the author's instructions and stage directions (permission for the Belvoir Street production of Waiting for Godot was nearly withdrawn when music was played at a point where the author had not prescribed it). In Michael Kantor's new production of Happy Days the famous mound of earth consuming the central character Winnie across the two acts is interpreted as a jumble of black metal plates surmounted with jagged rocks and looking as though Emil Pretorius's sets for a pre-war Bayreuth Walküre has mated with Ron Robertson-Swann's sculpture Vault ...
Feeling, real feeling, is the hardest thing to recreate in art. Too crudely represented, and it is coarsened to sentimentality, a victim of the limited vocabularies we have for emotional nuances and extremes; too refined, and we miss the point altogether, in a maze of cerebrations that elide its visceral genesis. The phenomenon of feeling encompasses everything that makes human beings such
Yes, a little bit of parochial preening is in order. Our Geoffrey just won the Tony for best actor for his role in the Broadway run of Exit the King - which premiered at our very own Malthouse, of course, in a Belvoir St co-production. What larks, eh?Meanwhile, my review of the Broadway show Avenue Q is in today's Australian.
In 1958, when the horrors of World War 2 were still fresh, Roland Barthes wrote a fascinating essay about Voltaire. Voltaire, said Barthes, was outmoded. For one thing, his enemies had all vanished - no longer were deists and atheists slugging it out in the public arena - and with this had vanished the spectacle of Voltaire's thought. "Better than anyone else, he gave reason's combat a festive
Optimism, by Tom Wright aft. Voltaire Malthouse/EFI/STC/SF @ Malthouse Fri. 22 May to Sat. 13Jun. Of late there has been some anguish in certain quarters about the intellectual substance of current first- and second-year university students, those scholars recently graduated from high school, and anguish, too, about the higher education experience generally. Think not upon’t! There is cause for great optimism. It was Wednesday night at the Malthouse. On account of my acute embarrassment at having not seen either Constance Yorkshire or Tom Fool until their respective final weekends, and therefore not posting on my experience of these shows until after their season had ...
Last night the Malthouse announced its second season for the year, and Ms TN selflessly trotted along and consumed the bubbly in order to bring you, dear readers, the news. I do think the Malthouse programming this year has a certain assurance, joi de vivre, whatever, which gives the seasons an immediate attraction... nothing to do with the champagne, of course.What first catches Ms TN's eye are
Kafka's Monkey is based on Kafka's darkly comic story, A Report to An Academy, in which an ape, Red Peter, lectures the "honoured members of the Academy" on his transformation into a cultured European man. Shot and captured on the Gold Coast of Africa, Red Peter is then confined in a cage in the bowels of a ship, where he learns the niceties of human behaviour - spitting, drinking rum and finally
News bulletin #153: Our Geoffrey has conquered Broadway with his genius portrayal of the dying Berenger in Ionesco's Exit the King. Among a swag of critical bouquets, New York Times senior critic Ben Brantley calls Rush a "fire-trailing comet" in an unreservedly rave review of Neil Armfield's production. It's a triumph for the Malthouse (known in its overseas entrepeneurships as Malthouse
This should have been a continuation of yesterday's post about peripatetic Australians, but only arrived in today's mail: to wit, an announcement that the Malthouse's production of Optimism, which opens in Melbourne in May, is traveling to the Edinburgh International Festival and the 2010 Sydney Festival. Both festivals and the Sydney Theatre Company are co-producers of the work, an adaptation
Back in 2000 I was, for six months, a writer-in-residence in the hallowed halls of academe, viz. Cambridge University. This was a most interesting time in my life, not least because I am completely innocent of academic qualifications. This didn't prevent my hosts from (just in case, I suppose) painting DR CROGGON in gold lettering above the door of my rooms, which is the closest I will ever get
The Music Hall has been a persuasive means of telling as well as a metaphor for some very good and even very great plays. Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War as a means and John Osborne's The Entertainer as a metaphor are two that spring to mind. The music hall setting, music hall style songs and looming First World War nudge Lally Katz's Goodbye Vaudeville Charlie Mudd towards the Littlewood camp, but in Charle Mudd the War never comes, the music hall isn’t really a music hall and the songs aren’t really music hall songs. Mudd’s vaudeville castle ...
“I am a famous liar,” boasts Johnny, the swaggeringly vulnerable teen protagonist of Adam Cass’s fascinating one-man play I Love You, Bro. He is, he hints, a bigger liar than Shakespeare himself.Certainly Johnny sees himself as a tragic hero, or perhaps heroine. He might be only 14, he tells us, but that doesn’t mean his feelings are childish; after all, Juliet was 14 when her love for Romeo
I Love You, Bro by Adam Cass Three to a Room @ Malthouse (Tower) Tue 10 Feb to Sat 28 Feb The Malthouse bar-and-restaurant was abuzz. You could hear it as the big barn door swung-to; it came like a hiss, Woyzeckwoyzeckwoyzeck. There was but one talk of Melbourne town. So what pert instinct led me to I Love You, Bro, currently back in Melbourne for a triumphant return season at the Malthouse? It was the marksmen’s maxim: keep another kill in view. “Just pretend you’re a VCA student,” said the box office cashier as he slid the unexpected complementary ticket across the gleaming ...
Ms TN flew back into the smoke haze of Victoria yesterday afternoon. It was all a bit spooky, peering out from my little metal tube 38,000 feet in the sky and watching this sunburned, smoke-scarred landscape below, all dry dams and empty rivers and bare paddocks. An aerial view gives a dramatic and rather frightening picture of just how drought-stricken Victoria is: you just can't see its aridity
