Reviews

A woman Ibu Helen (Ellen Marning) prepares a traditional Indonesian dish – sayur lodeh – her husband’s favourite and now hers too.  She is from regional Victoria, married to an Indonesian trade-unionist.  They have children.  This meal will be the last the family eats in Jakarta.  They are no longer safe.  They are leaving for Australia the next morning.  It is sometime between 1965-67, during the Indonesian military’s purge of ‘communists’ – i.e.

Here’s a tight, bright theatrical farce that should brighten anyone’s Christmas viewing. What the actual story is about, or who the main characters are, or what or where is Hamlington Hall... I’d guess there’s not a single member of the packed audience at the opening night who could tell you. To them it didn’t matter: they’d had a jolly good laugh.

As a poet, I have never attended an event with my art critic hat on and had the uncontrollable need to express myself poetically by what was unfolding before me, but last night, hearing Maria Callas at the Arts Centre, as I wrote in my notebook in the dark, the poetic lines were just falling out of me, and as I write this review the next morning, I can still see her image and hear her voice. It’s as if my mind believes that I really did witness Maria, like she arrived to me in a dream, her ghost came to me, to us, at the Arts Centre.

Showing Up, the latest film written and directed by Kelly Reichardt, is an apt film to view at the beginning of the Perth Festival at the Somerville outdoor cinema.

It deals with ordinary people who create art and the everyday mundanity of their lifestyles and necessary collaborations to get their art to an audience.

Lizzy, portrayed with grounded realism by Michelle Williams, sculpts ceramic figurines to express herself just as her father (played adeptly by Judd Hirsch) uses more functional pottery to put his voice out into the world.