Art Smitten: Reviews - 2017

Lifetime Guarantee is a new theatre production written by Ross Mueller.    It follows the lives of a group of people living in perhaps Melbourne,in perhaps the present. The two principle charters are Charlie, a young architect and property developer, and Dan, an slightly older news reader. Dan has just left his wife and children to be with Charlie. Charlie has just hired a personal assistant Jodie, who is new to the city. Jodie's dad has tracked her down in this new city and Dans ex wife got picked up in a bar by Jodie's dad.   It's all very intricately woven, and cleverly written. Unfortunately, I found all the characters quite dull, and one dimensional , with exception to Jodie who actually goes through some character development.    There were some really beautiful moments, but over all I found the work to be a bit conservative, this may be because I went into the show viewing it as a piece of 'queer theatre' which it turns out it wasn't.    It seemed like it wasn't quite

Smithers reviews Simon J Green's horror short film The Darkness.

The Privatisation of Ward 9B follows a desperate psychiatrist, Doctor Craven (played by David McCrae) in his efforts to supplement diminishing public funding by dragging his patients into the merciless world of economic enterprise. Written in 1991 at a time when the Hawke-Keating government was privatising public services such as airports, airlines, telecommunications and banks, Bill Marshall’s social message still rings clear - we bring an emphasis on profit making and cost cutting into the provision of public services at the peril of those most vulnerable in society. As I was born in the year it was written, I’ve only ever known these services to be private, and wonder if the setting had a more meaningful impact on the audience’s members from an older generation. Walking into the intimate black box theatre at La Mama, a nurse seated in the corner of the stage judged our every movements. It was as if we had entered a psychiatric ward as patients instead of a theatre as audience members, for

Faith is a difficult concept to explain to non-believers. I was never raised religiously, or even with any sort of a belief in a god. As such, I generally struggle to connect to stories of faith and to characters who so strongly experience faith, and it takes something special to make me truly understand what these people are going through. But Martin Scorsese, with his latest film Silence, has managed to do just that. Himself a lapsed Catholic, he may just be in the best position to convey the intricacies of faith. Silence is the story of two Portuguese Christian missionaries in Japan in the 17th century, a time when Christianity was forbidden and severely persecuted. It’s based on a novel of the same name by Shusaku Endo, a Japanese Christian author, which in turn is based on a real set of historical events. The two missionaries, Rodrigues and Garupe (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver), travel to Japan in pursuit of another priest by the name of Ferreira (Liam Neeson) who had gone to Japan many years ea

The only time I ever went to the circus was easily ten years ago, somewhere in Melbourne where I remember only feeling a little bad for the animals on display there. My second outing to the circus being this, I must say, that no animals were harmed in Cirque du Soleil’s Kooza; apart from if you count the man dressed as a dog who urinated on an audience member at one stage. I go into Kooza having a background in Theatre myself, both in acting, design and technologies such as lighting and sound. What Kooza does brilliantly isn’t just a circus act, but also a brilliantly staged and designed theatre act, which encompasses live music and a story which doesn’t need to told, instead, shown. The story of Kooza itself is about a boy in rags, who has a kite which closely resembles what he wears; grey, lifeless, and sagging. As he fails to send it high into the sky, a package is delivered to him, a jack in a box which comes alive, and transforms the world the boy resides in. The first act of the play i

Theatre has been my thing for a few years now, easily being my best subject in high school alongside Media. Thus, I’ve been a lot of theatre, both good, bad, amateur and professional, yet I’ve never seen a La Mama production until now. Todd in Venice is a Midsumma Festival show on display at La Mama from February 1st-5th. Written by Sofia Chapman, a musician and writer who has previously had plays on at La Mama, Todd in Venice details Anges Kermode and Michael Bark’s travels in Italy, where they come across the peculiar Todd Ash. Chapman’s story can be best described as a look into human emotion, sexuality, discovery and lust or love. Kate Hosking, Alex Beyer and Joseph Lai appear as the main cast, with Terry Cole and James Adler supporting as Guido and Doge of Venice respectively. Each character within the play are very separate to each other, meaning very different personalities clash on stage. Anges is a very direct woman, however consistently changes her mind and decisions, worrying about money one secon

Christian chats to Kent Morris, CEO of the Torch Project about Confined 8, an exhibiton on at The Gallery in St Kilda Town Hall that features 140 artworks by 130 Indigenous artists in or released from Victoria prisons.

Review transcript: You’re listening to Art Smitten on SYN. I’m Rebecca Houlihan, and today I’m going to be talking to you about a National Theatre Live production of No Man’s Land, written by Harold Pinter, and this version is directed by Sean Mathias. So this play was originally produced in 1975, which is where it’s set. The big draw card of this version is the two Sirs, Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian Mckellen. It’s a four-man play, and it focuses on conversations between the four characters. So that’s Spooner (played by Ian Mckellen) who’s this bumbling, failed poet, Hurst (played by Sir Patrick Stewart) who’s this successful writer that you don’t really know much about, and it’s clear his mind is deteriorating, and then the two younger men, Foster (played by Damien Molony), and Briggs (played by Owen Teale), who come into the play and you know less about them than either of the other characters, and they sort of raise a lot of the questions

Toni Erdmann is a German-Austrian comedy directed, written, and co-produced by Maren Ade. It centres on the relationship between the eccentric prankster father, Winfried Conradi (played by Peter Simonischek), and his stressed, work-a-holic daughter, Ines (played by Sandra Hüller). Spurred by the death of his dog, and the loss of his piano students, Winifried decides to spontaneously visit Ines, and thus essentially begins interfering in her life through pranks, questions, and inopportune comments that Ines fears will ruin her business partnerships. Winifried agrees to go home, but doesn’t, instead appearing again as his life-coach alter ego Toni Erdmann, and continues to push Ines to her limits. The film captured my attention because although a comedy, with absurd situations, the acting on the whole was admirably understated. The humour of the film came through the wittiness of the script, combined with situations that the actors let speak for themselves. This understated acting also contributed to

For me personally, reality television is not something that I’m a fan of; I don’t like the staged humour, staged love, and staged drama, as I could get all that from an actual written episode of fictional television, such as Fargo or The Fall. However, Phil Keoghan's The Amazing Race, alongside some other American reality shows, stand out among others, for either its ridiculousness, or its actual credibility, such as Keoghan’s show. Thus, stepping into the directing seat for another documentary, Keoghan brings us Le Ride, pretty much a sequel to “The Ride”, with some French mixed in. Le Ride is truly an interesting, one of a kind documentary in its own right. Keoghan decides to recreate the 1928 Tour de France in honour of the Australasian team which consisted of three Australians, Hubert Opperman, Percy Osborn and Ernest Bainbridge, and one New Zealander, Harry Watson. The race itself is known as one of the hardest and most brutal tours of all time, with only 41 racers