Cirrus@Austlit

'A rescue terrier shines in this charming adaptation of the children’s book about a dog whose tournament skills might just save the family farm'

'Five years since its debut, this gripping intergenerational story is still going in Australia and heads to New York this year. So why do we love S Shakthidharan’s play so much?'

'The internationally lauded company made up of entirely neurodivergent and disabled actors returns with a hilarious, provocative work of profound complexity'

'Max McKenna is superb in the tricky role of Anna, a young woman tormented by mental illness, while Nadine Garner is magnificent as Anna’s weary mother'(Introduction)

'Nathan Maynard’s great footy play is physically intense, following two Aboriginal players in a country team during the Adam Goodes era'

'Michael Fitzgerald’s new novel, Late, opens with a camera obscura, a direct reference to Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939). The image is a nifty one – a portrait projected across the Pacific Ocean, as well as across time itself – and it goes some way to signalling the author’s intentions: he wants to create a novel deliberately weighted by the creative works (films, books, art, and sculpture) that have come before and, for his protagonist – who in real life died on 4 August 1962 – those that have come since.' (Introduction)          

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'This world-class production anchored by superb central performances brings Sunday Reed back to shimmering, incandescent life'

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'The playwright’s stage adaptation of her semi-autobiographical novel explores Australia’s changing attitude to war, but it never rises above the schematic' 

'Over the past year the pandemic has devastated the performing arts in Australia. Theatre especially has been adversely impacted. In today’s episode, theatre critic and ABR regular Tim Byrne looks at how theatre organisations are coping now that venues are beginning to reopen. He interviews a range of artistic directors spanning Melbourne Theatre Company’s departing Brett Sheehy, Queensland Theatre Lee Lewis, Malthouse Theatre’s Matthew Lutton, and many more.' (Production summary)

'Because the Night is a decadent and elaborate production based on Hamlet, and a radical post-lockdown return for Melbourne’s Malthouse Theatre' 

'A low circular wooden walkway. A large canvas sack hanging from the ceiling. One sickening second to realise someone may be inside that sack, before it plummets to the ground. This is how Patricia Cornelius’s new play, RUNT, directed by long-term collaborator Susie Dee and starring another long-term associate, Nicci Wilks, opens: a thudding coup de théâtre that immediately establishes the work as incitement, as agitprop, as uncompromising sucker punch.' (Introduction)

'James Shapiro, in his brilliant book 1606: William Shakespeare and the year of Lear (2015), notes the general reluctance of the Elizabethan theatre to deal directly with the subject of plague, despite its pressing relevance to audiences of the day. He asks if this is ‘because it was bad for business to remind playgoers packed into theatres of the risks of transmitting disease or because a traumatised culture simply couldn’t deal with it?’ As our own theatre begins to emerge from pandemic, those twin concerns of risk and trauma loom large over the collective consciousness. Outbreaks that explode like spot fires around the country have sapped our confidence, and the gap between our desire to participate in live performance and our fear of community transmission still seems insurmountable.' (Introduction)

'There is a celebrated moment in Jonathan Glazer’s 2004 film Birth when Nicole Kidman enters a theatre late and sits down to watch a performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre. The camera remains on her perturbed features for two whole minutes. This image kept recurring as I read Claire Thomas’s new novel, The Performance. In it, three women sit and watch a production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1961), alone in their thoughts, their whirring minds only occasionally distracted by the actions on stage. If for nothing else, Thomas must be congratulated on the boldness of her conceit, on her ability to make dynamic a situation of complete stasis.' (Introduction)

'The great Spanish novelist Javier Marías includes a scene in A Heart So White (1992) where a translator deliberately mistranslates a conversation between two characters who obviously stand in for Margaret Thatcher and Felipe González. He does this to send a coded message to the other translator in the room, his future wife. It is an extraordinary set piece, a serio-comic exposé of the translator’s power but also of its limits. An individual, Marías seems to say, can manipulate communication between authoritarian states for private gain, but ultimately can’t safeguard against that authority.' (Introduction)