Theatre

Ellen Burstyn, in Melbourne to star onstage in 33 Variations, has a film career spanning six decades and including such cinematic touchstones as The Exorcist and The Last Picture Show. She talks tabout Beethoven, spirituality and recruiting Scorsese to direct her in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. “I asked that he be the director. He had already made Mean Streets, but it hadn’t been released and he was deeply grateful that I wanted him. This doesn’t mean that I gave him his start. And there was no stopping him, anyway – he would have got there in any case. But, you know, there was never any sense with Marty of working with a monster, with a master in the nasty sense. He’s marvellous, he’s an original. He’s smart and fiery and rough and excitable and alive.”

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child succeeds in furthering J. K. Rowling’s remarkable canon, with a greater dramatic thrust than the films but all the heart of the books that seduced young and old alike.

Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Mary Stuart shares with the recent film starring Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie a desire to portray rival monarchs Mary and Elizabeth I as sisters pitted against each other by the patriarchy.

The National Theatre’s modern, militarised take on Antony and Cleopatra – ‘the greatest of Shakespeare’s history plays’ – offers a flat production but fine performances from Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo.

Barrie Kosky’s peripatetic career has led him to work throughout Australia and Europe, before finally establishing a true connection with Berlin. Still, for the Melbourne-born theatre and opera director, nothing says “home” like a rehearsal room. “It just happened that theatre discovered me, and performance and music discovered me, because the very same time that I started to think, ‘Who am I? How does this relate to me?’ and felt that disconnectedness, was the very same time I was experiencing music: Mahler symphonies or puppet shows or musicals or opera. And it was very linked.”

Simon Phillips’ MTC production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night may lack a little of the comedy’s melancholy, but in Tamsin Carroll and Richard Piper it has performances as good as seen anywhere.

STC’s production of Patrick White’s darkly comic A Cheery Soul shows that the story of ‘monstrous’ nursing home resident Miss Docker is a still-relevant examination of the loss of agency in old age.

MTC’s childish ’80s romp Astroman – unsuccessfully transplanted from New Zealand to Geelong – is unlikely to appeal even to schoolkids, but more adult audiences will revel in Max Gillies’ masterful turn in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.

Barry McGovern’s one-man adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt is a masterpiece of poignant, pratfalling absurdity

Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Ruth Park’s still-resonant The Harp in the South trilogy for the STC boasts perfect casting for its darkly comic tale of gentrification and community.