While Henrik Ibsen is most known among theatre audiences for his stage plays A Doll’s House and Hedda Gabler but his stage adaptation of his epic poem “Peer Gynt” with musical composition by Edvard Grieg remains one of his most performed works as a story steeped in Norwegian culture and folklore.
Continue reading →There is a particular type of public fascination with kidnapping cases, perhaps because of great sympathy for the families and children who suffer the cruel crime or out of morbid relief that your family was lucky. One especially famous case that garnered a lot of attention was that of Jaycee Lee Dugard who was found in 2009 after being held captive for 18 years or the fictional account of Jack and his mother in Room by Emma Donoghue, based on the real experiences of Elizabeth Fritzl, found in 2008 after being held by her father for 24 years. At the heart of these media frenzies or the fictionalised stories seems to be a need to understand; how could this happen? Who would do something so awful?
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Ageing is a rocky road, whether you’re a teen entering adulthood with a world opening up that you hardly understand, or you’re on the other end of the spectrum and you feel the world closing in around you with each encroaching year. Grandmother and granddaughter Mudge both want to know what life has in store for them but they didn’t realise they’d have to go to Berlin to find out.
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The works of William Shakespeare are well-established cultural touchstones beyond the realm of the audience and performer dynamic but the ensemble of the Come You Spirits Theatre Troupe aim to inject even older traditions into these texts to amplify their resonances on a spiritual, energetic level. In this winter solstice performance of Macbeth, the story is placed in a spooky natural context in an embrace of its basic elements.
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Life can come at you fast, throwing up all sorts of obstacles that you weren’t expecting or don’t know how to overcome. For the teachers and students at this high school, they couldn’t have predicted how much of their lives would change over the next four years.
Continue reading →Renowned sex clown Betty Grumble returns to the stage to explore big feelings of grief, love, and fear and the great tools of navigation: art, pleasure, and justice. Grooviness is a state of being in touch and in rhythm so Betty invites all those enemies of grooviness, perpetrators of gendered violence, violence against the Earth, and violence against the self, to dive into her eco-feminist compost heap to eat shit.
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There’s something in the Sydney theatre air that means 2022 has been the year of productions focused on women’s emancipation and their right to choose their life path. Hush, A Letter for Molly, and Ghosting the Party considered mothering; Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lady Precious Stream, and A Doll’s House saw women navigating marriage contracts; and Chef, Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes, and now the Sweet Science of Bruising turn different lens on violence in women’s lives to examine power, freedom, and choice.
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Marriage is rich ground for conflict, having inspired countless dramatic examinations of hetero marital dynamics through the centuries. In this new adaptation of the 19th century classic, recognisable conversations about gender roles, freedom, and love demonstrate the timelessness of marriage stories under patriarchy.
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Gone with the Wind is an iconic American story with the novel by Margaret Mitchell earning a Pulitzer Prize in 1937 and selling more than 30 million copies worldwide. The movie adaptation in 1939 was also a great success, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture and breaking the record for the highest earning film ever when it was released. But it nearly didn’t make it to the screen.
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Fewer and fewer people these days have memories of pulling into the local video or DVD rental store to choose the selection of titles you would consume over the weekend. The closure of Blockbuster in 2014 felt like a huge blow to the industry as streaming services like Netflix took over. In the years since, more and more small, independent rental stores have met the same fate. Coil is an homage to those days and the memories so deeply embedded in films.
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Night Writes 