Reviews

Hamlet (the opera) is one of the jewels of the Adelaide Festival of Arts. It is a juggernaut, featuring an orchestra of 70, a cast of approximately 60 and a set that is monumental.

The Festival Theatre was packed to the rafters on the first night of this long-awaited opera and anticipation was at a peak. The audience was not disappointed.

The real heroes of this opera are Shakespeare, Brett Dean (musical score) and Matthew Jocelyn (libretto).

Knowing that this is a show enacted by youth performers, the title might lead you to expect a well-mannered examination/dramatization of teenage loneliness and/or online bullying. What we get instead is a pretty fierce and frightening depiction of human relations that, when faced with the sudden breakdown of society as we know it, descend into the kind of tribalism that signals a very bleak future indeed.

When writer David Finnigan speaks about his play Kill Climate Deniers he calls it “stupid, over-the-top, flashy, ridiculous, fun — and angry, because I am angry.” That’s a long list, but one that looks good after its dynamic premiere at the Stables Theatre. Winner of the $10,000 Griffin Playwrights Award for 2017, the play shows off its class effortlessly.

When you imagine a show called ‘spectacular’ it usually conjures a giddying, colourful array of acrobats, jugglers, plate-spinners and exotic dancers. Well, the Manganiyar Seduction is all of these things – only the visions occur in your mind’s eye – a mirage, an oasis created by the power that comes from 40 musicians performing traditional folk music together.