Peter Craven 
Ich bin ein Berliner
It was dazzling prospect, but it was also as exotic and unexpected as you could imagine: Barry Humphries narrating the story of his enthusiasm for the music of the Weimar… Read more
The South rises again
When the news broke a couple of years ago that James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave were to do Driving Miss Daisy (that quaint old tear-jerker directed on film by… Read more
Desert storm is true oasis
It’s funny that Brett Sheehy, who as director of the Melbourne Festival paraded a swag of uninspiring offerings, should have brought to the city, as head of the Melbourne Theatre… Read more
Hate crime
Stephen Sewell is one of the most formidable playwrights this country has produced, and a new production of his 1988 play Hate should demonstrate this unequivocally. It is the story… Read more
The allure of the other
It’s hard to imagine two more different shows, though each has a firm grip on the popular imagination. The Other Place by Sharr White is the first play for quite… Read more
Casualty of the trenches
War Horse is a show that comes with its triumph trailing before it. Everybody has heard of the famous production by the National Theatre in Britain which became first a… Read more
Coarse but fine
It was one of the big events of the Australian theatre calendar — Geoffrey Rush in an early Sondheim musical — and it was darkened by death. Only a day… Read more
Alone against the mob
It was the one bit of theatre at the Melbourne Festival that seemed worth a glance, but still you wondered: a production of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, the… Read more
A tropical stormer
The casting of Lisa McCune as Nellie Forbush in South Pacific provoked some dread. In fact this proved unfounded. Partnered with the most charismatic of contemporary opera stars, Teddy Tahu… Read more
Value judgement
How strange is all the fuss about that single incident in David Marr’s Quarterly Essay about Tony Abbott, ‘Political Animal’. According to Barbara Ramjan, who beat Abbott in a student… Read more
Ladies not for turning
Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls begins with a group of famous women from legend and history — Pope Joan, Griselda, the Japanese concubine/nun Lady Nijo, the Victorian traveller Isabella Bird among… Read more
A rocky marriage
It could have been one of the great events in the Australian theatre calendar. Marion Potts, artistic director of the Malthouse, was directing one of the great dramatic masterpieces of… Read more
Cheerio, possums
He calls it a farewell tour, and if it is then it’s astonishing to think we might have seen the last of Barry Humphries on stage. He has dominated the… Read more
Unfit for a queen
It would be wrong, as well as sexist, to say that the wonder is that it was done at all. The trouble with this Melbourne Theatre Company production of Lear… Read more
Hysteria won’t help
With the carbon tax about to shadow the all but terminally darkened reign of Julia Gillard, we have been subjected to a tumultuous and plangent debate on asylum-seekers that has… Read more
Thane in vain
Not for nothing do actors talk about the Macbeth curse and refer to the play as ‘the Scottish tragedy’ as if the horror of it were unspeakable. Peter O’Toole failed… Read more
Failure is an orphan
Annie must be one of the cheesiest musicals in the history of the world. The old Depression comic about Orphan Annie was given an improbable facelift in 1976, and the… Read more
Theatre within theatre
Thomas Bernhard is one of the greatest writers of the postwar period and his novels, with their complex vituperative repetitions, their intimations of an anger so self-consuming it becomes comical… Read more
A glass menagerie
Simon Stone’s glass-encased production of The Wild Duck is a showcase for two of our finest actors Simon Stone’s Belvoir Street production of The Wild Duck (often a trickier play… Read more
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