Culture

The coronavirus crisis has left many in the arts struggling. But Belvoir artistic director Eamon Flack is determined to use the shutdown as a catalyst for positive change and to push ahead with bringing new Australian works to the stage. “Really early on in this – when we didn’t know how bad it was going to get – we decided that this was going to be a good time to rethink a whole lot of things. We wanted to come out of this crisis, however long it went on for, having fixed some things, and having made some deep, permanent changes.”

If they had given me a choice in who I’d want to haunt for the rest of their mortal life, it would have been a toss-up between a celebrity – a real celebrity, although I don’t really mind which one, they all kind of homogenise after a point – and my spinster aunt. I can see myself floating around her sprawling Federation cottage, dressed in a romantic, billowing white dress, doing kind and lovely things like leaving flowers on the windowsill, or gently rustling the curtains as she drinks tea and thinks about her poor niece, dead at 32, such a shame, so young, so beautiful, what a tragedy.

While welcoming the Covid-19 lockdown as a chance to catch up on some TV and film viewing, this reviewer found himself craving, with a few notable exceptions, the romance of the cinematic experience.

Before becoming a playwright, screenwriter and showrunner, Tony McNamara was a stockbroker who had failed year 11 English. Now, after being nominated for an Oscar for The Favourite, he brings his acerbic dialogue and honest storytelling to his new TV series, The Great. “I saw a lot of Pinter, a lot of Mamet, Caryl Churchill … I was struck by how visceral it was, how you could get a rhythm going that really carries an audience along.”

A waiting room. It’s mid-afternoon, a Monday, and the chairs are hard blue plastic. Mostly young women today, red-eyed babies on their knees, all busy rustling through their handbags for plastic containers of sultanas or carrot sticks. The babies have the expressions of goldfish, their lips pursed and cheeks bulgy, their eyes wide open and blinking dumbly. A woman sweeps through from the surgery, her child’s bare limbs dangling from her arm. Let me wrap her, the man behind her says. I just want to get her in the car, she snaps back. The patient feels dizzy again, and closes her eyes. She made it here, at least.

Forgoing depth and complexity for cheap nostalgia, Beastie Boys Story has little of the vitality that characterised the band’s music.

Anglo–Nigerian author Bernardine Evaristo wrote seven books before her Booker Prize-winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other, catapulted her into the limelight. “I have done the work for people to now engage with it. It’s just the most incredible thing, because at my age – I’m 60 – to suddenly become an overnight success, is very exciting. It’s also a real moment of hope for people who have been writing for a long time and haven’t received the kind of attention they’d like to get. And also, for Black women, and Black British people.”

The sun had barely rotated out of bed by the time the bakers had begun rolling croissants, the baristas singing out orders, and the second-hand bookstore owners prudently applying dust to their first editions. It was just another morning in a suburb of restored heritage properties, and the air, having been buttered and brewed into a naturally occurring atmosphere, made the moustached men strolling around Redfern feel as though they could be anywhere at all, excluding where they actually were.

Sydney Chamber Opera’s Breaking Glass comprises four exciting new works, in which Australian women composers reimagine the myth of Odysseus, the story of the night parrot, and works by Sylvia Plath and Margaret Atwood.

Jess Hill’s incisive examination of domestic violence saw the journalist win the coveted Stella Prize last month. But the four-year project also took an immense personal toll. “All that advice about self-care … I didn’t do any of it. I almost pointedly didn’t do it. I thought: ‘You need to feel, even just one iota of the pain and suffering the people you are talking to are feeling.’ If I was feeling really relaxed and detached from it, I wouldn’t be able to write about it in the way I wanted to … I sort of had to inhabit it.”