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  • Divine Comedy : The Personae of Barry Humphries The Online Monthly - subscriber only access
    Peter Conrad | Theatre | March 2010 | Society & Culture

    In 1987 on her British talk show, Dame Edna Everage abruptly asked Sir John Mills when he intended to retire – a tactless query, expressed with her usual indifference to the feelings of others. Mills, a spry little rooster then nearing his eightieth birthday, said he had no...

  • The Comeback Kid: Eddie Perfect’s 'Shane Warne: The Musical'
    Gideon Haigh | February 2009 | Theatre | Society & Culture
    Consider these three vignettes from the storied life of Shane Warne, involving something that happened, then something that didn't, then something that is.

    On 10 June 2000, London's Daily Mirror publishes front-page allegations that Warne harassed a nurse, whom...

  • As You Like It: An interview with Geoffrey Rush
    Peter Craven | The Monthly Essays | Theatre | April 2007 | Society & Culture
    Geoffrey Rush's last appearance on an Australian stage was in 2002, with Life x 3, in which he and his wife, Jane Menelaus, transfigured the production and made it dance through a great whirligig of typologies. Well, he is back on stage again with a new production, by...
  • A West Side Story: Casey Bennetto’s 'Keating!'
    Robert Forster | Theatre | February 2007
    So, what is this? Casey Bennetto, the author of Keating! and one of the lead actors in it, says that it was first written as a "performance piece". The production at the Belvoir St Theatre is longer, with new songs and characters, and is a "show"....
  • Awaken the Gods: Barrie Kosky’s ‘The Lost Echo’
    Edward Scheer | Theatre | October 2006
    Barrie Kosky is going to be pissed off. No booing, no heckling, no rotten fruit, no veal cutlets (yes, an Italian audience once threw these after a futurist performance): just whoops and wild applause greeting the performers at the end of the opening night of The Lost Echo...
  • Interrogation Dances: The Making of 'Honour Bound'
    Caroline Baum | Theatre | September 2006
    In the first week of August, two shows opened in Sydney: an arena-scale production of the hit musical The Boy from Oz, and Honour Bound, a new work from director Nigel Jamieson, in partnership with choreographer Garry Stewart and physical-theatre company Legs on...
  • For the Love of Goat: Edward Albee’s 'The Goat, or, Who is Sylvia?'
    Edward Scheer | Theatre | June 2006

    Australian theatre can be predictable: middle-class melodramas with the inevitable living-room setting, neurotic characters vaguely redolent of relatives from childhood Christmas dinners, and talk about an ever-diminishing number of topics (...