Reviews

If you’re partial to noir thrillers and like your humour hammy, you’ll enjoy The 39 Steps. Based on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 classic thriller, this adaptation is a top class piss-take. Mike Smith gets to show off his dashing strut and pencil moustache flaunting skills as hero Richard Hannay, while Anna Burgess hams the bejesus out of three femmes fatale, using wigs, gorgeous makeup and overacting to perfection to distinguish mysterious foreigner Annabella, unworldly Scottish Pamela and ditzy Margaret.

Australian’s aren’t too practised at perfecting Noël Coward and certainly not at the New, where he’s the antithesis to its historic association with socially relevant theatre.

Coward requires the lightest of touches. The truth needs careful separating, slow heating into a bouncy soufflé, sprinkled with crisply nuanced dialogue: a gossamer of society and manners which amuses as much as it disguises.

The Daniel Schlusser Ensemble’s M+M is a piece of theatre that defies easy categorisation and straightforward description. You could broadly call it a piece of avant garde performance art, but that catch-all overview doesn’t give much indication of style or content. The program notes invite the audience to enter it as “a piece of theatrical architecture, a space where reality is a fragile commodity”.

Sharmill Films continues its very worthy presentation of the National Theatre Live film series with Nicholas Hytner’s production of Shakespeare’s Othello, starring Adrian Lester as the Moor and Rory Kinnear as Iago. The contemporary setting in a Middle Eastern military base, with the cast dressed in combat greens, serves once again to underscore the timelessness of Shakespeare’s work and the depressing realisation that human nature has barely changed one jot since this work was first staged back in the 17th century.