If the second half of Bell Shakespeare’s Pericles is easier to endure than the first, it is because the writing improves so markedly and so suddenly. There is a perfectly good reason for this: Shakespeare actually wrote it. Although counted

Predictability is not always a bad thing in storytelling. Tragedies routinely rely on it for their sense of, well, tragic inevitability. But knowing how a story is going to end means the process by which one reaches that denouement necessarily

Back in October, I wrote a review in which I more or less lavished praise on The Navigator, a contemporary opera by Liza Lim and Barrie Kosky. I have thought a lot about my response since then, not entirely agreeing

And so it seems that I am doomed to play the naysayer once again. Because while Hassan Abdulrazzak’s Baghdad Wedding has had every other member of the punditry doing back-flips (or at least star-jumps) since it opened a fortnight ago,

The French film theorist and critic, Nicole Brenez, once wrote of those films “you can’t watch again because you’ve loved them too much”. (She was talking about Godard’s Le Mépris.) Here in Australia, where for the most part only opera

The Nature Theatre of Okalahoma, I was perhaps not too surprised to learn, is in fact not from the forty-sixth state of the union, but rather from New York City, its name lifted with characteristic tongue-in-cheek-ness from Kafka’s Erectile Dysfunction