Australia
David Kettle
I’m Ready to Talk Now, Traverse Theatre ★★★★There are, inevitably, certain challenges when reviewing a one-to-one immersive show that’s already pretty much sold out its entire Edinburgh Fringe run (though there are rumours of some last-minute additional tickets for I’m Ready to Talk Now being released). For a start, influencing potential audience members to buy or not buy a ticket goes almost entirely out the window. In addition, giving too much away might spoil the impact of Oliver Ayres’s brief, fragile but hugely powerful creation for those who have already booked.All that said, it’s the Read more ...
David Kettle
Alright Sunshine, Pleasance Dome ★★★★★Edinburgh writer Isla Cowan’s deceptively powerful solo show begins as an almost affectionate tribute to the city’s Meadows, fittingly just a few minutes down the road from the show’s venue – its yummy Morningside mummies taking their offspring to nursery, its chilled-out yoga groups, its joggers and gaggles of students hunched around disposable barbecues. By the show’s blazing close, however, the Meadows has become a place of violence and trauma, and the play has transformed into a blistering howl of fury and frustration at women’s conflicted role in the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Readers of Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winning novel will be familiar with its themes of war, extreme suffering, ageing, memory, fidelity and infidelity, as it roves over the decades from World War Two to the late Eighties.Flanagan based much of the book on his father’s experiences as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese, forced to work as a slave labourer building the Burma railway, and his experiences are rendered in hellish detail by director Justin Kurzel in cahoots with screenwriter Shaun Grant. Kurzel’s younger brother Jed composed the show’s haunting and regretful soundtrack, a key Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
It’s not foregrounded, but as Strangest Feeling beds in after repeated listens it becomes clear that one of its core traits is The Pixies-originated quiet-loud, soft-hard dynamic which oozed into grunge. The second LP from the Irish-born, Sydney dwelling Bonnie Stewart isn’t a grunge album, but it has a kindred sensibility.Take third track “Bittersweet”. It has a My Bloody Valentine / Pale Saints haziness but as a verse gives way to the chorus – boom, an explosion. The voice is folky, lilting, the melodies honeyed. Yet Stewart likes offsetting this with flare-ups indicating that – presumably Read more ...
Sarah Kent
It took until the last room of her exhibition for me to gain any real understanding of the work of Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray. Given that Tate Modern’s retrospective of this highly acclaimed painter comprises some 80 paintings and batiks, the process had been slow! To relate to her imagery, it was as though I had first to slough off all expectations about art, and even my world view. Gazing at Winter Awely I 1995, (pictured right) the very last painting in the show, I was suddenly transported back to the Northern Territories, north east of Alice Springs, where Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Tell me what you see” invites Robert Forster during Strawberries' “Tell it Back to me.” The album’s eight songs do not, however, necessarily say what Forster actually sees. These vignettes about encounters between characters come across as imaginary scenarios.This contrasts with the former Go-Betweens lynchpin’s last album, The Candle and the Flame, which was a direct – albeit allusive – reaction to the diagnosis and treatment of his wife Karin Bäumler’s cancer.“Tell it Back to me,” the tale opening Forster’s ninth solo album, tells of a man – an English teacher – who meets a woman who Read more ...
Markie Robson-Scott
“Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” is the menacing motto (sounds more scary with an Australian accent) of the tanned, muscular denizens of Luna Bay beach. But the unnamed hero known as The Surfer, played by Nicolas Cage, isn’t listening.The Surfer is directed by Lorcan Finnegan (Vivarium, 2019; Nocebo, 2022) and written by Thomas Martin (both are Irish). They were inspired, says Finnegan, by John Cheever’s The Swimmer as well as Australian New Wave movies of the 70s. This film is, however, not big on subtlety and has a limited scope. It’s shot in Yallingup, Western Australia on a beach and a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The art of the conman is persuading their victim to fool themselves, which is the premise that lies at the core of this Australian drama series. Adapted by screenwriter Anya Beyersdorf from the eponymous memoir by Stephanie Wood, Fake is the story of a relationship between Joe Burt (David Wenham), apparently a divorced business entrepreneur and farmer forever juggling a variety of property schemes and financial deals, and 50-ish food journalist Birdie Bell (Asher Keddie), who seems to spend an inordinate amount of time not writing very much for her newspaper.They first meet via a dating Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
On 26 September 1966, The Twilights set-off from Australia to Britain. The journey, on the liner the Castel Felice, took six weeks. A day after boarding they learned their sixth single, “Needle in a Haystack,” was an Australian number one. There was nothing they could do to promote the hit, so after disembarking at Southampton they looked for work.The trip was the prize at Melbourne’s Battle of the Sounds competition. They won and, as well as the travel, the accolade included a recording session with EMI in London. As The Twilights records came out in Australia on EMI’s Columbia label, this Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Young eldritch junkie Nick Cave would have struggled to predict his maturity as a font of wry and sacred wisdom, or the fathomless loss he reckoned with en route.Wild God followed the harrowed Skeleton Tree and grief-illumined Ghosteen, necessary steps towards the new album’s explosion of hope. The Bad Seeds returned in full, though compressed by Dave Fridmann’s controversial mix to one more forceful layer among a gospel choir, orchestra and Cave’s ecstatic voice. The sound could seem superficial at cynical first glance, the lyrics uncharacteristically rough, the whole project a bid to secure Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
What’s to be said about an album that’s half well-executed body-moving, dancefloor pop and half sickly, slick schmaltz? It’s as if the creator is covering off all possible fanbases, those with taste and those lacking it. From a reviewing perspective, with theartsdesk’s score-out-of-five system, it’s tricky; one song I’m thinking, “Yes, a whopper, and the next, yuk, a pure zero.” But, staying positive, about 20 minutes of Do What Makes You Happy’s approximately 40, are full of entertaining verve and bounce.Alice Ivy is the stage-name of Melbourne-based German-Australian electronic producer Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Amy Taylor and the rest of the Sniffers ambled onto the stage of Birmingham’s O2 Academy to a huge roar of approval from a packed and diverse audience on Sunday evening. With her Farrah Fawcett hairstyle, toothy smile, sparkly bikini, knee length boots and shorts she didn’t look the firebrand that her image suggests – but looks are frequently deceptive, as Birmingham was to find out.In fact, Taylor laid down the simple but iron rules of the night before Declan Mehrtens had even strapped on his guitar: “If anyone falls down, pick ‘em up. Don’t touch anyone that doesn’t want to be touched.” Read more ...