Tom Wright on ‘The Oresteia’
- Nick Terrell
Tom Wright, Associate Director of the Sydney Theatre Company, is drawn to classical tragedy “because it is difficult” and “because it is bigger than us.” Classical tragedy asks difficult questions of our quotidian and pragmatic ideas of order, justice and accountability. Ideally, any new adaptation of the Oresteia will renew and reframe these questions.
I asked Wright why it’s important to keep these works on our stage and how he has approached Aeschylus’ trilogy. Read more
I Was a Teenage Child-Killer - ‘Thrill Me’
Thrill Me - Presented by Squabbalogic and the 2010 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras at The Seymour Centre, Downstairs.
Stephen Dolginoff’s Thrill Me sets out to tell a new version of the 1934 murder of Bobby Franks by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. The story has been represented directly in Meyer Levin’s film Compulsion, elliptically in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, and autobiographically in Nathan Leopold’s own words. Leopold lived long enough to repent. Loeb might have come to the same sort of mature contrition and meditative conformity but before time could weigh on his conscience he was stabbed to death in prison. Leopold and Loeb have taken their place as exemplary figures in the tradition of deluded would-be-übermenschen. For all their privileges they are a particularly tawdry pair. Read more
You could be happy - ‘Optimism’
- Nick Terrell
Optimism presented by the Sydney Festival, Sydney Theatre Company, Edinburgh International Festival and Malthouse Theatre.
Playing at the Drama Studio, Sydney Opera House.
Directed by Michael Kantor
By Tom Wright (“after Voltaire”)
Optimism offers up a barrage of novelties that seek insistently to divert. See the dancing monkey-men, the bubbles, beach balls, strobe lights and smoke machines, count the industrial fans and cap guns, and marvel at the cheesy dance-craze choreography. Kantor’s theatre is determined (almost to the point of neurosis) not to be dull. In a little over two hours, Wright, Kantor and their clown troupe of theatre makers serve up such a smorgasbord of theatricality it would be indigestible if it wasn’t so shiny, sugary and easily absorbed. Read more
The Good Life - Mike Leigh gets all Happy-Go-Lucky
- Nick Terrell
I.
For anyone who has seen a few of Mike Leigh’s films, it would come as no surprise to hear that his work is motivated by “anger at the way the world is so screwed up.” Leigh’s characters are routinely exposed to trying times. He defends his realism staunchly, but it could still be said that his films have a tendency to linger in the bleaker realm of realistic experience. At the same time, though, Leigh’s characters include a healthy handful of rather wonderful people. Read more