Reviews

Last night the Cenotaph and Martin Place were in readiness for Armistice Day. White plastic chairs and multiple arrangements of huge red poppies waited behind wire fencing for the sombre service that marks the end of the “war to end all wars” … and remembers the loss and destruction of the many wars that followed.

In Aboriginal culture ,magpies are symbolic of motherly love, security, food, and sometimes ominous signs of danger. In part one of An Indigenous Trilogy, titled Three Magpies Perched in A Tree, writer and performer Glen Shea delivers a resplendent gothic  tale set in outback central Australia - a story that is reminiscent of his own life as part of the stolen generation and his time working in an aboriginal community centre.

Two shepherds, sisters Anna (Laura McCluskey) and Becky (Thalía Dudek) spring an intruder (Alexandros Pettas) on their isolated hard-scrabble sheep farm somewhere in the English Midlands.  He says his name is ‘Guy Tree’ and claims he was looking for scrap metal; he has a ridiculously small spanner to prove it.  In this very first scene, given the quality of the writing and the distinct performances, we learn about the landscape, the sheep and these three characters - the way they think, talk, and behave.  Anna, the elder sister, is quiet, phlegmatic but kin

The Metropolitan are to be congratulated for their initiative of filming and making opera more accessible to a wide audience, particularly those of us who do not live in the USA.

Their choice of Medea by Luigi Cherubini, composed in 1797 with a libretto by François-Benoît Hoffman and based on Euripides' tragedy of Medea and Pierre Corneille's play Médée has come out of left field as it is not commonly in the repertoire of most opera companies throughout the world.