Posts tagged 'theatre'

Today we finish our week-long series of reviews written by Victorian librarians of books shortlisted for the Premier’s 21. There are five categories, and we’ve published a different category every day. At an awards dinner on Tuesday 6 September the Premier will announce the winners of all five categories. One of these five titles will then be announced as the winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature.

Until then, we’re inviting you to explore all 21 titles. If you’ve read one or more of the titles, write us a review and vote for the title you’d most like to see win the overall prize. The title receiving the most votes will win the People’s Choice award.

Monday we began with reviews of the three poetry books shortlisted for the CJ Dennis Prize for Poetry. Tuesday saw the publication of reviews of the six novels shortlisted to win the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction. We continued on Wednesday with six reviews of non-fiction titles shortlisted to win the Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-Fiction. Yesterday, we published reviews of the titles shortlisted to win the Prize for Writing for Young Adults.

Today, Carnegie Library’s Rosemary Pullan looks at Sappho … in 9 fragments, South Yarra Library’s Michele Bence explores the “involving drama” that is Patricia Cornelius' Do not go gentle…, and the State Library’s Des Cowley reviews Raimondo Cortese’s Intimacy, describing it as “a play that explores the simple human connections we are able to make with others.”

(Click to watch video.)

Why is it that we see so few plays by Australian women on stage? Why is it that women are still so under-represented, despite the great strides made in recent decades by feminism? What responsibilities does the theatre have? How can female playwrights avoid the stain of tokenism and kid glove criticism?

In this video, Playwrights Patricia Cornelius and Van Badham, Artistic Directors Marion Potts and Ralph Myers and moderator Chris Mead discuss contemporary Australian theatre’s relationship to gender, diversity and the canon.

Depiction of Queen Scheherazade telling her stories to King Shahryar in The Arabian Nights, via WikiCommons

Arnold Zable’s popular story collection Cafe Scheherazade has been adapted for the stage. The play, written by Therese Radic and directed by Bagryana Popov, brings to life the stories of migration and displacement that Zable has made it his life’s work to document.

The book, and play, are set in a popular St Kilda cafe opened by Jewish Holocaust survivors in 1958. The cafe – famous for its chicken soup and Black Forest cake – closed in 2008. In his history of St Kilda buildings, A Place of Sensuous Resort, Richard Paterson wrote of the cafe, “on Sunday mornings, it was the gathering place of single men living in St Kilda boarding houses or one-bedroom flats, who had lost entire families in the Holocaust and who came to Melbourne as refugees.”

Its owners named the cafe after a Parisian nightclub that features in the novel Arch of Triumph by the popular German inter-war novelist Erich Maria Remarque. The owners of the cafe, Avram and Masha Zeleznikov, became separated at the end of the Second World War and the tumultuous events that engulfed Poland thereafter. They agreed to meet at the Parisian nightclub they knew from the novel. They were eventually reunited there in 1949. Scheherazade herself, of course, was a popular figure in Persian and Arabic folk tales, who told such beguiling stories that she was able to forestall her death at the hands of a sadistic king, whom she eventually tamed with the power of her storytelling. Scheherazade continues to be a ubiquitous presence in popular culture.

Cafe Scheherazade runs at fortyfivedownstairs until 3 April.

Sydney Opera House 1975, image by Gregory Melle, Flickr

A theatrical wildfire has sparked up at Crikey following a review of David Williamson’s sequel to Don’s Party, Don Parties On. The play premiered in Melbourne last year, but the Crikey review, penned by Jason Whittaker, was published last week after the play opened at the Sydney Opera House. In the review, Whittaker takes the play and its playwright to task for complacency, suggesting Williamson is guilty of that which he’s satirising.

Earlier this week, Crikey published a reply by Williamson in which he suggested the spat might be generational. “He’s a young man; I’m not,” he writes. As to how he would wish the play to be judged, Williamson concludes, “I’d prefer history to judge me rather than a group of self-appointed Philosopher Kings.”

The piece raises the question: how reliable is history’s judgment? Shakespeare’s plays, Williamson reminds us, barely survived the critical oblivion of the Elizabethan age, and did so only thanks to the devotion of actors committed to memorialising them in print.

Click to watch video.

Playwright Hannie Rayson is over our politicians. “There’s something excessively enervating about opinion polls,” she argues as she sees our politicians becoming less about leading as they focus on focus groups and soundbites. She wants more inspiration and more “saying what matters” that she’s seen in the arts.

As the Victorian state election approaches, Rayson reckons “We need the arts to show us who we are” and we need our politicians, like our best actors, “to commit to the truth of a character”.

The Independent reports that Agatha Christie’s heirs are dragging Wikipedia to court for the online encyclopedia’s spoilers that give away the plot twists and ending of the 1952 mystery play.

Wikipedia’s entry for the play features a section called Identity of the Murderer which explains that “audiences are asked not to reveal the identity of the killer to anyone outside the theatre, to ensure that the end of the play isn’t spoiled for future audiences” and then goes on to baldly state the identity of the murderer.

Christie’s grandson, Matthew Prichard, told the paper, “I think it is a pity if a publication, if I can call it that, potentially spoils the enjoyment for those people who go to see the play. It’s not a question of money or anything like that.” Pritchard was given the rights to the play on his 9th birthday by Christie.

Wikipedia defends its position as a reference work that supplies all information about a variety of literary works, but fans of the 20th century’s most famous crime writer claim that it ruins the play’s impact. Wikipedia removed its spoiler warnings in 2007 which would have offered Christie devotees fair warning that the play’s ending will be given away.