The filming of Shakespeare In Italy continues in the hours the actors have off their day jobs and it is clear we have invented, inadvertently, a new kind of movie, the fifty-thousand dollar Ben Hur, part theatre, part up-close intimate performance of classic heroic drama. Lucy and Jordan are ripe for Oscars; or in a just world they are; and, if he turns up for work today, Steve Parker, our ginger-bearded chunky bass baritone, a mysterious recluse with the impact on stage of Brando. It is a measure of Adelaide that these world standard actors — and Wayne Anthoney, Bruce Venables, Nathan whatsisname, John Paisley and Roger Newcombe are among them — must work in other jobs than acting to make ends meet in this, the crucible of Australian cinema in the nineteen seventies (Picnic, Sunday, Storm Boy, Breaker, The Club) and now alas no more than the sandpit of the sluggardly Dutch creep Rolf De Heer, whose Dr Plonk grossed less than any film in history since Edison’s Electrocuting An Elephant did less well than expected in 1909.
It is a measure too of Adelaide that the heads of the South Australian Theatre Company, the South Australian Film Corporation, the Adelaide Film Festival Film Fund and Arts SA have refused to come to the play although it has been hailed as the best in English in four centuries, a joy to be at and ‘the most significant artistic event in Adelaide in many, many years’.
I had hoped it might open the Adelaide Film Festival in October next year but if none of them turn up tonight I will withdraw the offer. The London Film Festival, I think, with a season at the Globe or Stratford just before it, seems a better option than enriching these ingrates.
Very slow people, these Adelaide bureaucrats, yawning and turning away from their salvation. As they do, as they do. It is their way.
I will see them at the show tonight, or they can forget it.
And so it goes.
Name:
Pearls before swine Bob.
Did anything good ever come out of Adelaide?
Mere provincials. Take it to London where they appreciate a playwright of your talents.
Did anything good ever come out of Adelaide?
Don Dunstan
Logical geometry in town planning
Anthony LaPaglia
A biennial Festival of Ideas
Robyn Archer
An annual Festival of Arts
Bluestone architecture
Mark Oliphant
Maslin’s Beach
John Schumann and Redgum
Coopers ales, all of them
Jimmy Barnes
Shaun Micallef
Notoriety per its status as a weird city with too many mass murderers.
Bill Leak.
Kate Fitzpatrick.
Lois Ramsey.
Robert Helpmann.
Luke Walladge.
Ron Haddrick.
Annabel Crabb.
Lord Florey.
Julia Gillard…
Tony Blair…
Free Settlers
As oppossed to the brown bag carrying anestors to the Macquarie Street politicians and beyond
ancestors of convicts that is
You’ll find that Gillard is from Wales, and Adelaide (and the ALP) will be disowning her right about… now
I take it all back!
Andrew Bolt came from Adelaide so it must have something to recommend it.
It is indeed a damn good play, very good indeed, but I fear you have gone the 11th yard by saying it is “the best in English in four centuries”.
A few other fine plays spring to mind since 1612, but I’m happy to be proved wrong.
All the best for the Italian job, it sounds like something special.
Name one.
Your play is really terrific, and it is up there with the best, but given the challenge, of the plays I’ve seen, here are 10 I’d rate as the best:
1. The Importance of Being Ernest
2. Streetcar Named Desire
3. Waiting for Godot
4. Death of a Salesman
5. A Doll’s House
6. 12 Angry Men
7. Equus
8. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
9. Three Sisters
10. Glengarry Glen Ross
I know this is just more of Bob’s”hyperbowl” but what the hell! It’s an excuse to discuss some good plays. I agree with The Importance of Being Ernest, Waiting for Godot and Death of a Salesman. Timeless. I admit to The Homecoming as my personal Pinter favourite but throw The Caretaker in there as it was my first experience of a SUDS performance in 1967 and opened up a whole new world right then. A Man for All Seasons WAS a good play, no matter that Bob Ellis also recommends it and can’t leave out Look Back in Anger for other breakthroughs. I have only seen the great TV version, but loved The Norman Conquests also.
Considering the “in English” as a dead letter for this exercise (after all Godot should be there anyway) I throw in The Lower Depths also (there have been performances in multiple languages, including English) and it is truly ‘from life’.
These are mostly good calls but Cat On A Hot Tin roof which is about ‘curing’ a homosexual shouldn’t be there and Streetcar is nonsense, Blanche being a drag queen and her pretensions worse than those of Kristin Williamson. Gabler rather than Doll’s House, Godot is French…Ernest in a class of its own in its perfection. Put in Alan Bennet’s Forty Years On and I’ll agree with you. Maybe I’m only number eleven.
It was a good try.
We’ll agree to Top 10 then!
You deserve it for this brilliant effort.
Sorry, Godot is indeed French; and even though Cat is dated by the beliefs of the time, it made a grand stage production.
I think with Streetcar it depends on the quality of the production. Wanna be Brando’s do indeed render it nonsense, but it has value in the crisp dialogue.
(add Paul Kelly [singer/songwriter] to the Adelaide list)
One of the nation’s greatest storytellers and top of my Adelaide list