Culture

The hallway resounds with unfamiliar footsteps at dawn. Ella and Iris lie in bed listening to the sound. They look at each other in the murky morning light, both knowing it is a man. An unwanted man. The girls creep out of bed and poke their heads around the door, wanting to catch a glimpse of their mother’s new lover. He is scraggy and sleep-worn, his step uneven on the floor.

Theatre-maker S. Shakthidharan draws on the great Sanskrit epic poem the Mahābhārata as an enduring wellspring for his art.

Queensland Theatre’s First Casualty takes an unvarnished look at the costs of the war in Afghanistan.

Forest Collective’s new concert, Sun Songs & Cycles, is adventurous, ranging across styles and themes from bird migration to Doctor Atomic.

The horror-comedy The Menu is let down by a crude script and a cruder understanding of the absurd.

Māori artist Lisa Reihana excavates multiple histories to bring forgotten stories out of the darkness of colonisation.

Aldo’s wings began to sprout when he was two years old. They pushed through the skin, little feathered extensions of his shoulder blades. His parents, Ralph and Rhonda, bound him tightly with bandages that held the fledgling wings tucked against his back. He found it hard to breathe as he played during the day but at night he was unwrapped. He stood in the middle of his bedroom and moved his shoulders up and down to flap his wings, but he remained anchored to the floor.