Front Page Archive

  Did she or didn’t she? Louisa Collins was the last woman to be hanged in NSW, found guilty of the poisoning death of two husbands. Dubbed the ‘Borgia of Botany’ by the newspapers of the day, she went to her death …

Who holds the power in Baby Doll? When the film (directed by Elia Kazan) was released in 1956, it was controversial because of its overt sexuality (the Catholic Legion of Decency gave it a ‘Condemned’ rating and labelled it ‘grievously offensive to …

  Inescapable fact: We’re all gonna die. Indisputable fact: The ‘death industry’, ie. those good folk helping the bereaved arrange funerals is massive (well, there’s always a demand – and just think of all those times you’ve heard ads exhorting you to …

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Zahra Newman as the titular cat Maggie, opens with her rendition of Cry Me A River, in which she holds the stage like a sultry cabaret star in a dark nightclub. It continues with an …

I’m not confident about reviewing classical music, but I am a big fan of the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra and have been lucky enough to attend many of their concerts over the years, so I just want to tell you that their latest …

“There’s nowt so queer as folk.” That’s an expression from the north of England (Yorkshire and Lancashire, if you want me to be precise), which basically means there is no accounting for human behaviour. It came to mind as I was watching …

Chaos versus order; the heart versus the head; science versus emotion. These are the themes running through Lucy Kirkwood’s ambitious new play Mosquitoes. At its heart is the relationship of two very different sisters, intellectually brilliant Alice (Jacqueline McKenzie) and her much …

The publicity photos for A Little Piece of Ash show the actors with cigarettes in various orifices but this is not a play about smoking, it’s about grieving and loss, and moving on. It’s about life. Jedda’s mum has just died. It …

Ebola, swine flu, SARS: we’ve seen many epidemics erupt in recent times, resulting in scores of deaths around the world. What we haven’t seen is a contagion resulting in deep, dream-filled sleep. Yet this is the calamity that befalls a small American …

Part family drama, part road trip and part cri de coeur, Barbara and the Camp Dogs is both a raucously funny tale and a soberingly sad one. It’s also a really good musical night out, with Belvoir’s upstairs theatre converted into a …