Culture

In a grim lesson for the age of conspiracy, The Vow explores how the search for meaning can be twisted to dark ends.

For Melanie Chisholm global fame came at a high price, but she lived to tell the tale. At 46, she has just released her eighth solo album, which she says is her most vulnerable yet. “All of that time I spent searching, trying to find myself, trying to move away from Sporty, I felt like that’s what I had to do: to become an individual I had to leave her behind.”

He wasn’t certain when the slow-growing bacillus had entered his body, but Mycobacterium tuberculosis had stealthily spread through his system – a silent invasion as he coughed up great wads of red-stained sputum. He imagined the army of bacteria marching onwards, tiny warriors intent on harm, relentless in their advance.

A cynical nod to Agatha Christie’s locked-room mysteries, Régis Roinsard’s The Translators fails to recognise the complexities and canniness of that storytelling tradition.

A Facebook message seven years ago prompted poet and activist Janet Galbraith to found a writing group that brought hope and connection to refugees. “It was formed out of the relationships between human beings, reaching through prison fences and beyond borders.”

The curtains parted to reveal the leggy assistants in their beaded corsetry and feathered headdresses, and, when the sparse audience applauded, the man in the fedora emerged. He took a bow, tipped his hat and then threw it out into the audience, and spotlights tracked it, then when they switched off the hat disappeared. A little ooh rippled through the audience and the clapping doubled. The “magician” made a big deal out of this, laughing as though he’d even surprised himself, and the show began. Phil could feel himself sweating. The man’s voice was enough to make him mad. It was so pathetic. Imagine dedicating your life to this grotesque pageantry, he thought, and the more cruel things he thought about the “magician” the better he felt, until he was barely listening to or watching the show, but instead was revelling in his own fury, his loathing and disgust letting loose in the dark. He found one of his wife’s hairs on his suit jacket and snapped it between his fingers, dropping th...

Audiences salivating over the impending arrival of Hamilton to the Sydney stage in 2021 can get an early, small-screen taste of the hit musical, courtesy of the Covid-19 disruptions and Disney.

After a whirlwind 2019, in which three of her plays debuted around the world, Anchuli Felicia King is showing no signs of slowing down. The Thai–Australian playwright and multidisciplinary artist speaks about language, learning from other Asian women and how storytelling can make a difference. “I’m drawn towards muscular political storytelling, art that has a clear politics and an ethical framework it’s trying to impart. That feels especially vital in a world lacking humane moral leadership.”

I was born at home. My mother was a hippie back then. Growing barrels of pot on the roof, and part of the Community of the Whole Person – an amateur psychotherapy thing. She told a story once about how I’d been a grounding force as a baby, while she was doing a therapy session with a high, damaged person, and she’d been glad I was there. My sister watched the birth, sitting beside the Great Dane. There’s a picture of me a few moments after I was born – dark hair, angel’s thumb on my forehead – lying on a bloodied sheet on my parents’ bed.

In his latest film, It Must Be Heaven, Elia Suleiman continues to explore the absurdity and tragedy of being Palestinian, and weaves in a moving contemplation of the ageing body.