Category Archives: Articles

Mo Yan Wins the Nobel Prize for Literature

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For those of you who think you can bet on this competition, I say give up now and promise me you will never try again.  Mo Yan of China has won the 20102 Nobel Prize for Literature. Mo Yan Born: 1955, Gaomi, China Residence at the time of the award: China Prize motivation: “who with hallucinatory realism merges […]

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Pearls Before Swine – An Evening with Orson Welles. (Sydney Fringe Festival)

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I started at the top and worked my way down. Blake Erickson must be an enormous Orson Welles fan. Either that or he looks so much like him and was obviously mistaken for the ghost of Orson Welles so many times, he decided to just run with it and be him for and hour or […]

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Dogs Barking – Pantsguys do Richard Zajdlic and bring in-yer-face to Fringe. (Sydney Fringe Festival)

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A sign outside the performance of Dogs Barking in the King Street Theatre reads: Dogs Barking contains coarse language and cigarette smoke … as if these are the most confronting elements about this “in-yer-face” theatre production written by Richard Zajdlic. It turns out to be a poor warning for the uninitiated into “in-yer-face” theatre, a style […]

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Here Lies Henry: Jason Langley and Matthew Hyde do Daniel MacIvor (Sydney Fringe Festival)

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Metatheatre is usually loosely described as comedy and tragedy at the same time, where the audience laughs while experiencing empathy. The technique allows for a unique experience where audience and actor are almost blurred into a different sort of creature so that the traditional experience of “watching a play” is completely turned upon its head. […]

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Zoe: Jean M Gordon examines grief and letting go. (Sydney Fringe Festival)

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I’m never going to have my Zoe. How do you mourn someone who never existed? Jean M Gordon is a young writer from Sydney who has written works for the popular Short and Sweet festival (what an important haven for young writers that festival is) as well as several short stories.  Here she tackles the complex subjects […]

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Room – Peter Malicki locks us all up and asks the hard questions. (Sydney Fringe Festival)

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Throughout the performance of Room you will hear several films referenced.  Cube, Saw, and The Matrix are some of them.  All these films deal in some way with our abilities to observe ourselves within a stylised reality that has been created for us. They are each about the discovery that what we thought about our […]

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The Day the Galaxy Inevitably Exploded and Died – Ildiko Susany explores what’s left when nothings left.(Sydney Fringe Festival)

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Can you hear that silence?  It frightens me.  I can hear the death of the stars. And so opens the enormously ambitious first work by play write Ildiko Susany, an extremely talented young woman from Brisbane in Sydney with her play for the Sydney Fringe Festival. It is on at the charming and cozy King Street […]

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Booker Prize Short List

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Well – its been announced and I am rather pleased to see that except for Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home I haven’t read any of the short list.  I’m pleased because this means I have five wonderful books to hurtle through before the big dinner on Tuesday the sixteenth of October. Hopefully I can come up with my suggestions before the […]

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Jack Killed Jack – Thomas De Angelis writes for his contemporaries (Sydney Fringe Festival)

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I just spent a very enjoyable hour and a half at the Italian Forum Cultural Centre watching a nice little piece of theatre written and performed by a small group of twenty-year-olds. The play is largely about being twenty, and being twenty in the face of a decidedly non twenty-year-old tragedy. Seven young people decide to spend a weekend […]

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Sydney Fringe Festival

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Hello everyone… Well I am out of hibernation now and looking forward to giving you tons of music reviews, film reviews and Booker Long List feedback.  But most exciting of all at the moment is the Sydney Fringe Festival that started on Thursday this week. I’ve booked myself up for lots of goodies:  Some live music, […]

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