Latest news with #MelbourneTheatreCompany
AU Financial Review
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- AU Financial Review
Call to action put Melbourne Theatre Company in the black
Melbourne Theatre Company defied an 11 per cent fall in box office receipts to post a small surplus in 2024, thanks to an unusual fundraising campaign instigated by its outgoing chair Jane Hansen. But there was no such philanthropic rescue at Victoria's second-largest theatre maker, Malthouse, which annoyed some donors in February 2024 when it hosted a show by anti-Israel activist Clementine Ford, at the same time as Jewish musical Yentl played at its main theatre.
Perth Now
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Fishtrap Theatre a platform for creativity
Mandurah Performing Arts Centre has launched The Fishtrap Theatre's bold new look, with the venue rebranded and reimagined as an intimate performance hub for locals and visitors alike. The venue has unveiled a new wall mural created by internationally renowned artist HandBrake, aka Hans Bruechle, along with an upgraded bar and pre/post show entertainment, including local performers and DJs. The revamp is accompanied by Fishtrap Theatre's latest studio season of four performances, which kicked off on May 16 with blues 'n' roots musician Ben Catley. Your local paper, whenever you want it. It continues on May 26 with Melbourne Theatre Company's powerful production Slap. Bang. Kiss. following three young people whose stories start a series of events when they go viral. Credit: Supplied Written by award-winning playwright Dan Giovannoni, the performance is directed by Katy Maudlin as part of Melbourne Theatre Company's education and families program, featuring Tyallah Bullock, Conor Leach and Tsungirai Wachenuka. Following its world premiere at Subiaco Arts Centre, Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company's production Thirst tours south on June 10, as playwright Barbara Hostalek's romantic comedy full of heart and karaoke explores themes of country, community and survival. Thirst. Credit: Supplied Family adventure Whalebone rounds out the program on June 21 with a visually theatrical experience of gadgets and imagination performed by clown, inventor and comedian Jens Altheimer. Mandurah Performing Arts Centre creative development and programming manager Alison Pinder said the team was incredibly proud of the diversity and richness of this season. Whalebone. Credit: Supplied 'The Fishtrap Studio is all about bringing bold, exciting and sometimes surprising stories to life, and this season does exactly that,' Pinder adds. 'The Fishtrap is more than a theatre, it's a platform for creativity.' Program information and tickets at
The Age
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Is this the end of the road for John Pesutto?
Liberals widely accept there is little to no chance of holding Hawthorn. At the recent federal election, polling booths for the federal seat of Kooyong wholly within the state seat of Hawthorn swung against the party. One Liberal Party member forecast the attitude of Hawthorn electors if they were forced back to the polls in a by-election as: 'We are going to have to attend a by-election because the Liberal Party bankrupted their former leader.' Already there is speculation that the Liberal candidate for Kooyong, Amelia Hamer, could be asked to stand in Hawthorn. What a chance of a lifetime that would be! And parallel speculation that Rob Baillieu, son of ex-premier Ted, and a local city of Boroondara councillor, would stand in the byelection. But not as a Liberal. As a teal independent. If he were to win it would be a further humiliation for the party, leaving leader Brad Battin with an even bigger mess to clean up. Dreyfus' week of hasty exits Melebrities did not know which way to turn on Wednesday night. Bell Shakespeare's stirring production of Henry V staged its Melbourne premiere at the Arts Centre and ex-attorney general Mark Dreyfus, recently deposed in a ghoulish and unedifying bit of factional skulduggery, was a prominent attendee, grinning happily as he queued for his ticket. Perhaps a little too happily. Dreyfus exited the post-performance drinks at great speed, quicker than he did cabinet last week. Melbourne Theatre Company artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks exited the auditorium and positioned herself by the stairs, immediately snagging richlister and former MTC chair Jane Hansen on the way out with her spouse and fellow richie Paul Little. Deputy Lord Mayor Roshena Campbell attended with her journalist spouse James Campbell, while the Myer family squad was represented by Rupert Myer, chair of the MSO Edgar Myer, and Andy Myer and spouse Kerry Gardner. We also spotted singer-songwriter Paul Kelly. Neighbours star Tim Kano was the tallest guy in the room, save maybe for barrister and Bell Shakespeare chair Philip Crutchfield, who was accompanied by his lawyer spouse Amy Crutchfield, winner of the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry. NGV trustees chair Janet Whiting was in fine form, seemingly all is forgiven after CBD snubbed her at the Formula 1 grand prix in favour of Luke Sayers, newly emergent after a summer social media scandal. And on Thursday lunchtime, a postscript, when Dreyfus walked out of the Commonwealth Offices Building at Treasury Place. As Dreyfus departed the executive offices in the company of a group of unidentified women, we hear that his name was being erased from the directory board in a manner as brutal as King Henry's obliteration of Lord Scrope. A representative of The Australian newspaper followed him all the way down Treasury Place for comment but to no avail. Stay classy, Mark. Gang of Four Meanwhile, political Melebrities flocked to the first birthday anniversary party of FMRS Advisory, formed a year ago by Dan Andrews' fantastic four gang of former advisers (in no particular order): Adam Sims, Ben Foster, Jessie McCrone and Lissie Ratcliffe. Friends, supporters and admirers flocked to the No Vacancy gallery in QV, including Felicity Pantelidis, deputy chief executive of law firm Maurice Blackburn and her spouse, Lord Mayor Nick Reece. Also there: serving ministers Harriet Shing, Danny Pearson. Former ministers Lisa Neville, Luke Donnellan, Martin Foley. Arnold Bloch Leibler partner and lawyer of the multiverse Leon Zwier was spotted, former major events minister and incoming Crown Resorts chair (*subject to regulatory approval) Martin Pakula, soon to be ex-Vic Chamber boss and soon to be new Melbourne Football Club chief executive Paul Guerra, secretary of Victorian Trades Hall Council Luke Hilakari, Fox family consigliere Ari Suss and national Nine News TV boss Hugh Nailon. Spectacular queues At the same time, the 'arena spectacular' of Les Miserables opened at Rod Laver Arena on Wednesday night with pretty much the usual suspects. With big queues for entry 10 minutes before show time, a CBD operative spotted Tennis Australia boss Craig Tiley zipping straight in through a VIP entrance. Well, he is kinda the host, we guess. We did enjoy hearing about the zealous usher who directed patrons to 'act like it was the tennis' and not move around. Clearly, they have never been to a Kyrgios match. Ubiquitous red-carpeter Matt Preston was there of course, RuPaul-adjacent comedian Rhys Nicholson, ABC escapee Sammy J, Neighbours icon Stefan Dennis and that bearded comedian whose name we always forget. May Meltdown The Liberals made Sussan Ley their first female leader this week, but the party's standing among female voters remains grim after successive electoral drubbings. The party's latest May Meltdown was a source of particular frustration for Liberal women who've spent decades calling for the party to improve female representation in the party's parliamentary ranks. This week, a petition has been circulating among party members calling for an introduction of gender quotas, started by former staffer Charlotte Mortlock, founder of Liberal women's organisation Hilma's Network. Other co-creators include former NSW planning minister Rob Stokes and his finance executive wife Sophie Stokes. For years, even the suggestion of implementing gender quotas has enraged parts of the party's right flank. Former PM Scott Morrison suggested he was open to the idea four years ago and, well, it's been four years. But the Liberals are a broad church, and among the few hundred signatories to the latest petition, CBD spotted a few surprising names. Among them, former Liberal VP Teena McQueen, last spotted celebrating Donald Trump's election victory at Mar-a-Lago with her new boss Gina Rinehart, before firing off a WhatsApp message in defence of Alan Jones when the broadcaster was charged with indecent assault offences (which he is fighting). Not who we'd expect to be fighting for gender quotas in the Liberal Party, but again, broad church, etc. Was it actually Teena signing the letter? If so, she never returned CBD's calls. One 'signatory' we did hear back from was former Howard government minister turned Sky News firebreather Gary Hardgrave, who told CBD he rarely signed petitions, and didn't sign the one on gender quotas. To be fair, his post-election tweet about 'left faction saboteurs' killing the Liberal Party and leaving it in a 'woke choke' made his position fairly clear. Also among the signers – former test bowler Nathan Bracken, who unsuccessfully ran for the Liberals in the 2023 NSW election, probably unaccustomed to the swing going against him.
ABC News
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
The Black Woman of Gippsland uses a colonial legend to highlight present-day injustice
Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this article contains references to people who have died It's 1839. Three Gunaikurnai people come across a wet lump on the beach. On closer inspection, it turns out to be a body, with face down in the sand, lips blue. The woman is a survivor of a shipwreck, perhaps the Britannia or the Britomart, both ships that were lost in the Bass Strait that year. This story is told in the opening scene of The Black Woman of Gippsland, a new play written and directed by Yorta Yorta/Gunaikurnai theatre-maker Andrea James (Sunshine Super Girl), presented by Melbourne Theatre Company for YIRRAMBOI festival. The Gunaikurnai people give the woman food, water and a possum-skin cloak, and she follows them when they move camp. Eventually, she becomes "kin": "And Auntie makes her a daughter / And Uncle makes her his wife." According to colonial legend, the woman on the beach is the White Woman of Gippsland, who colonial settlers believed was captured by local Gunaikurnai people in the 1840s. The story transfixed Melbourne at the time but had tragic repercussions for Gunaikurnai people that are still felt today. Though never confirmed, the woman's rumoured existence sparked several rescue expeditions. It resulted in the arrest of a Gunaikurnai lore man known as Bungelene, who died along with his wife after being imprisoned without charge for 18 months. "The capture of this woman was pinned on him, and he died in custody. He was one of our first black deaths in custody in this country," James tells ABC Radio National's The Stage Show. The play's protagonist, Jacinta (Chenoa Deemal), is a researcher completing her PhD, a "blakademic" who James says she modelled on women she admires, including Lou Bennett, a senior lecturer in Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne, writer Romaine Moreton and artist Fiona Foley. "I've been influenced by so many incredible Aboriginal women scholars … so I knew I wanted this woman to be uber-smart, tussling it out in academia." Through Jacinta, we learn about the legend of the White Woman of Gippsland, the subject of her thesis. In 1840, Angus McMillan, a Scottish-born pastoralist and early coloniser of Gippsland, stumbled upon a group of Gunaikurnai people near Port Albert. "He said that he saw a woman clad in a cloak who kept looking back at him," James says. The group disappeared, leaving behind them a collection of objects typical of what might wash ashore after a shipwreck: clothing, tools, sewing supplies, blankets, bottles and a Bible. In a letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald in December 1840, McMillan — who went on to perpetrate numerous massacres of Gunaikurnai people, including the Warrigal Creek massacre in 1843, where 150 people were shot — suggested the woman was European and "a captive". McMillan also found the body of a two-year-old baby wrapped in a kangaroo skin bag, who he believed was also of European descent. "They assumed that it was this woman's baby. And so, from that, a legend was generated," James says. As rumours of sightings of the woman continued to circulate, the city's power brokers, meeting at the exclusive Melbourne Club (still in existence today), decided to act. "By then, all sorts of letters to the editor are being written about this poor, fluttering pigeon in a nest of vultures," James says. "They raised money to find this damsel in distress … [and] they sent this expedition party out." The rescue party pinned handkerchiefs embroidered with messages in English and Gaelic to trees, in the hope the woman, who was said to be Scottish or Irish, would find them. "There's a family on Gunaikurnai country who has one of these handkerchiefs in their possession," James says. Although the woman was never found, the story made its way into Gunaikurnai culture, too. References to shipwrecks and a white woman appear in traditional songs, which feature in the play. "There's [also] a story about a legend of a woman with long red hair who lived in a cave," James says. In these stories, the Gunaikurnai people don't hold the woman captive; they help her. It shows how the official historical record can mislead, James says. "[The colonisers are] thinking they're seeing one thing, but actually another thing is happening from our point of view. "It's about reading between the lines." Setting the story in the present day was a deliberate choice. "If it was just a purely historical telling, then people would say, 'That happened in 1840 — we've moved on,'" James says. When Jacinta goes off-grid to throw herself into her thesis, she inadvertently triggers a missing-persons case. Her Auntie Rochelle (Ursula Yovich) has to return to the police station where her sister, Jacinta's mother, died in a cell years earlier. "For her to put in a missing-persons report and to find her missing niece, she has to return to the scene of a crime," James says. James wrote the play against a tragic backdrop: the scourge of Aboriginal deaths in custody, including that of Yorta Yorta woman Tanya Day, who died in a police cell in 2017. At last count, there have been at least 590 Aboriginal deaths in custody since 1991. As James was writing the play, "these deaths in custody just kept happening", she says. "I couldn't help but feel the irony, the juxtaposition between all of the resources that were poured into this white woman that may never have existed, as opposed to the absolute violations that were happening right now to Aboriginal women. Or, as Jacinta puts it, "They spent all this time and money looking for a white woman … But who are the women who are really missing and dying?" The play also explores the tension between Indigenous and Western understandings of history. Jacinta has reached an impasse in her research; she's read her way through the archives, but "it feels like something is missing". She tries to explain the conflict to her PhD supervisor, who doesn't quite get it. The historical record is "contradictory", she tells him. She wants to yarn with her Elders; he wants her to seek approval from the ethics committee to conduct formal interviews. When he tells her the archives should be her primary source, she responds, "How valuable can they be when my people's voices are absent and the language is offensive and racist?" It's a conflict that still plays out today. Several monuments to McMillan remain in Gippsland, despite efforts by the Gunaikurnai community to have them removed or altered to explain his role in frontier conflict. "That's why it's really important to keep telling these stories because only one side of this story has been told for a very, very long time," James says. The Black Woman of Gippsland is at Southbank Theatre The Sumner, as part of YIRRAMBOI festival, from May 5-31, 2025.
The Age
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
It's time to meet the mystery woman behind Hitchcock's greatest hits
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.' It's often cited as one of literature's greatest openings: in just a few words Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca conjures its narrator's voice, its haunting setting and the tone that will carry the rest of the mysterious novel. In the 1950s du Maurier was Britain's highest earning female author. This year Malthouse Theatre will mount an adaptation of her story The Birds, while Melbourne Theatre Company will take on Rebecca. If you know du Maurier's name but not much more, it's a fine time to get better acquainted. Melbourne film writer Alexandra Heller-Nicholas lists du Maurier among her favourite authors. 'I'm actually surprised that more of her work hasn't been adapted. Her short stories are made for film. There's something really slippery about them that I find so beautiful, but also quite discomforting.' Like many, Heller-Nicholas came to du Maurier through Alfred Hitchcock. The master of suspense adapted three of du Maurier's tales – The Birds, Rebecca and the novel Jamaica Inn – but the long shadow he cast means that today most people associate those titles with the director, not the writer. For all their strengths, Hitchcock's films don't capture the extraordinary intimacy of du Maurier's prose. Heller-Nicholas calls Rebecca one of the great Gothic stories, comparing it to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. 'It's a story about how reality can't keep up with a fantasy. It's powerful and it's dark and it's beautiful and it's intimate. Rebecca reads like somebody's whispering into your ear.' MTC artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks was living in London when she first happened upon a copy of Rebecca. She was bewitched. 'She draws you into the inner world of the characters, their fears and their fantasies, and then suddenly things get very complicated and the drama escalates. It is thrilling. This is a romance that becomes a mystery and it is thick with suspense.' The other reason Rebecca stayed with Sarks is that 'it was so ahead of its time. It's bold and her writing captures a wit and humour that still feels very fresh. Daphne du Maurier was speaking in a very sophisticated, coded way to women at the time and all these years later she still speaks to me.' Sarks says that du Maurier's ability to create landscapes through language is a gift to anyone trying to adapt her work. '(Her) writing is incredibly evocative. It's poetic and muscular. She crafts vivid descriptions of the trees, the flowers, the rhododendrons and azaleas, and of the woods surrounding Manderley. The natural world is another character in the book and in our production too.' Then there's the haunting (and perhaps haunted) setting of Manderley. The gothic manor was modelled on Menabilly, a gorgeous country home in Cornwall that du Maurier discovered as a teenager and later restored. In private letters she often spoke of her love for the estate she called home for more than 20 years, and in a later essay on Rebecca she described it in terms as lavish and vivid as any of her fictions: 'At midnight, when the children sleep, and all is hushed and still, I sit down at the piano and look at the panelled walls, and slowly, softly, with no one there to see, the house whispers her secrets, and the secrets turn to stories, and in strange and eerie fashion we are at one, the house and I.' Du Maurier's life off the page was as interesting as anything she invented. Born into a sprawling dynasty of actors, authors and artists, she led a tomboyish childhood that translated itself into what she called the 'male energy' that fuelled her writing. She was rankled when people cast her as a romance novelist, but as the decades have passed her reputation as a serious literary talent has grown. She was a contradictory figure, described by some as reclusive and by others as a warm and witty host. She could be proud, but her own family only discovered she'd been made a Dame when they read it in the newspaper. Loading Du Maurier's elusive character is mirrored in her writing; even when grounded in reality, something unsettling hovers beneath the surface. Du Maurier's delicate use of the paranormal brings to mind Shirley Jackson, another mid-century author whose work frequently produced a sense of the eerie. 'The parallels with Shirley Jackson are really interesting,' says Heller-Nicholas. 'Whether we want to call them capital-F feminist writers or not is obviously open to debate, but certainly these are two writers who at their best were interested in the gendered experience. They really understood how the fantastic is a language to explore that.' The Birds is one of du Maurier's most effective short stories. Unlike Hitchcock's sunny version, the original takes place in grey Cornwall, where a farmer and his family find themselves under inexplicable avian attack. As it becomes clear that this violence is both coordinated and occurring across the country, the beleaguered victims find their chances of rescue dwindling while their questions only grow. Malthouse artistic director Matt Lutton hit upon du Maurier's short story while pondering the possibility of 'adrenaline and terror in the theatre. How can we create something that will really have a big bodily impact on audiences?' He recalled that Hitchcock's adaptation had terrified him, but when he came to the original tale he found so much more to play with. He took the idea to writer Louise Fox. She called it a no-brainer: 'Du Maurier's a deeply adaptable writer, for theatre, for film, for other mediums ... Her metaphors stay open, and her use of genre and the paranormal and the mysterious is very evocative. It's weird because she was always considered a romance writer. But actually, she's a writer about anxiety and paranoia and fear and overthinking. She's probably got more in common with Kafka than she has with a romance novelist.' Critic Mark Fisher has attributed the eeriness of du Maurier's tales to the way they reveal how our attempts at making sense of the world are laughably fragile. Birds shouldn't attack en masse. Rebecca should stay dead, or at least have the decency to out herself as a ghost. Fox agrees that the sense of fighting something you can't even explain is something people of all eras can understand: 'The desperate attempt to try and make sense of something that is incomprehensible or unexplainable or hard to define.' Lutton and Fox's adaptation will be performed by one woman (Paula Arundell) complemented by a rich soundscape piped through headphones straight to audience members' ears. The director says his aim is 'to tap into that very primal animal instinct of what it means to feel attacked. We all know what it is to be swooped by birds. You naturally protect your eyes, your ears, and I think that's about feeling, in a metaphorical way, like something much larger than you, that you definitely can't control, is assaulting you.' He jokes that audience members fleeing their seats would be a sign of success, but also notes that 'there are no birds in the theatre. It's sound and it's light and it's a performer. It's the power of a ghost story or a campfire story. When you tell a campfire story, you start to see the story in the shadows around the fire.' As long as we keep telling stories, hopefully, du Maurier's shadows will keep offering up their secrets.
