AUDITORIUM

✮✮✮✮ Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía Emilio Sagi | Fabio Biondi It was 33 years ago that Emilio Sagi, former artistic director of Teatro Real Madrid and Teatro Arriaga Bilbao, first directed rising star Mariella Devia in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale. The soprano now known as the last prima donna of the Italian old school has long since graduated from the role of young widow Norina, and for the past three decades has reigned supreme as Donizetti’s various

✮✮✮ Pina Bausch/William Forsythe/Hans van Manen English National Ballet Sadler's Wells | London Prowling prima-donnas, solemn couplings, violent human sacrifice – Tamara Rojo’s latest bill for English National Ballet is underpinned by tension, divvied across three starkly different twentieth-century ballets. The diverse programme speaks to the company’s growing versatility under Rojo’s direction, as well as its expanding repertoire, which is steadily amassing prominent Europe

✮✮✮✮ Simon McBurney's The Kid Stays in the Picture The Royal Court Theatre | London directed by Simon McBurney Is it a play? Sort of. Is it a movie? Again, sort of. The English language needs a new word to describe Complicite's rip-roaring, multi-sensory staging of movie mogul Robert Evans' bestselling 1994 autobiography, which was also once made into a film. With up to four screens on stage projecting clips from classic movies as well as live camera shots, plus a pulse-racin

✮✮✮ 1/2 Shakespeare's Richard III Bell Shakespeare | Sydney directed by Peter Evans Born ugly, Richard never understood what it is to be loved, and his story details the effect on a person when rejection is a constant and central defining experience. Coupled with what we now term privilege, his aristocratic life places him in a position of power in spite of that perpetual derision, and what results is a bitter thirst for the reciprocation of inhumanity that knows no bounds. ​

✮✮✮✮ Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman Deutsches Theater | Berlin directed by Bastian Kraft Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman receives new life on the stage of Max Reinhardt’s former Theater in Berlin, the Deutsches Theater. Premiered in 1949, this piece is possibly Miller’s most well known work and one for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Despite being translated into another language (a version by Volker Schlöndorff and Florian Hopf) this quintessentially Americ

✮✮✮✮ Shakespeare's Roman Tragedies Barbican Theatre | London directed by Ivo van Hove Politics can be murder. In the current climate of Brexit and Trump, we’ve seen first hand the effects of politics on the ‘people’, two camps, two sides, two stories and no real winners. Placards in hands, petitions, riots, uprisings we have a voice and we want it heard (even if we don’t get what we want). The Toneelgroep’s spectacular 6-hour epic, Roman Tragedies, is about neither but oh doe

✮✮✮✮ Angus Cerini's The Bleeding Tree Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Lee Lewis A man has been killed by his wife and two daughters, shot deliberately in cold blood and left to die. It is rural Australia, so there is no hiding the disappearance of a person or the circumstances surrounding the savage incident. Angus Cerini’s The Bleeding Tree confronts the rules of society, exposing the inadequacies of how we live as communities and how we forsake the weak. The dea

✮✮✮ 1/2 Lucy Kirkwood's Chimerica Sydney Theatre Company | Sydney directed by Kip Williams Massacres, no matter how catastrophic, can get forgotten. Unlike the 9/11 attacks that we memorialise everyday, fuelled partially by economic imperatives of the USA. Incidents such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests have faded away with time, and in this particular case, with rigorous effort on the part of Chinese officials. ​ The arresting image of a man standing in front of battle

✮✮✮ 1/2 Shôn Dale-Jones' The Duke Adelaide Festival | Adelaide directed by Shôn Dale-Jones The Duke is entirely a one-man show, with Shôn Dale-Jones sitting at a desk, accompanied by two microphones providing variation to his voice (one with reverb, one dry), and a laptop on which he operates sound cues. Theatre is almost always a collaborative art form, although here, there are only the artist and his audience. It is a doggedly minimal approach for staging a play; all we hav

✮✮✮✮ Handel's Saul Adelaide Festival Barrie Kosky | Erin Helyard Stories of narcissism are more relevant than ever. In our age of omnipresent cameras and selfie-fueled social media, we are made to look at our personal selves more intensely than ever before, with no belief system powerful enough to convince us of any detrimental effects that would come from this unnaturally high level of self-obsession. We are all kings and queens, in our own minds at least, always placing the