sat 16/08/2025

Australia

Orpheus and Eurydice, Opera Queensland/SCO, Edinburgh International Festival 2025 review - dazzling, but distracting

There’s a lot to shout about in this Orpheus, especially the way it looks. In a thin year for staged opera at the Edinburgh International Festival, they’ve gone for an eye-popper with this staging of Gluck’s most influential work. Premiering at...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews: Kinder / Shunga Alert / Clean Your Plate!

Kinder, Underbelly, Cowgate ★★★ Drag artist Goody Prostate (yes, I know) receives a call from a local library. Garbed in lederhosen and sporting a preposterous German accent, she was expecting a brutal, no-prisoners-taking drag roast battle....

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Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews: I'm Ready To Talk Now / RIFT

I’m Ready to Talk Now, Traverse Theatre ★★★★There are, inevitably, certain challenges when reviewing a one-to-one immersive show that’s already pretty much sold out its entire Edinburgh Fringe run (though there are rumours of some last-minute...

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Edinburgh Fringe 2025 reviews: Alright Sunshine / K Mak at the Planetarium / PAINKILLERS

Alright Sunshine, Pleasance Dome ★★★★★Edinburgh writer Isla Cowan’s deceptively powerful solo show begins as an almost affectionate tribute to the city’s Meadows, fittingly just a few minutes down the road from the show’s venue – its yummy...

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The Narrow Road to the Deep North, BBC One review - love, death and hell on the Burma railway

Readers of Richard Flanagan’s Booker-winning novel will be familiar with its themes of war, extreme suffering, ageing, memory, fidelity and infidelity, as it roves over the decades from World War Two to the late Eighties.Flanagan based much of the...

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Album: Bonniesongs - Strangest Feeling

It’s not foregrounded, but as Strangest Feeling beds in after repeated listens it becomes clear that one of its core traits is The Pixies-originated quiet-loud, soft-hard dynamic which oozed into grunge. The second LP from the Irish-born, Sydney...

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Emily Kam Kngwarray, Tate Modern review - glimpses of another world

It took until the last room of her exhibition for me to gain any real understanding of the work of Australian Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray. Given that Tate Modern’s retrospective of this highly acclaimed painter comprises some 80...

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Album: Robert Forster - Strawberries

“Tell me what you see” invites Robert Forster during Strawberries' “Tell it Back to me.” The album’s eight songs do not, however, necessarily say what Forster actually sees. These vignettes about encounters between characters come across as...

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The Surfer review - Nicolas Cage is relentlessly down and out in western Australia

“Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” is the menacing motto (sounds more scary with an Australian accent) of the tanned, muscular denizens of Luna Bay beach. But the unnamed hero known as The Surfer, played by Nicolas Cage, isn’t listening.The Surfer...

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Fake, ITV1 review - be careful what you wish for

The art of the conman is persuading their victim to fool themselves, which is the premise that lies at the core of this Australian drama series. Adapted by screenwriter Anya Beyersdorf from the eponymous memoir by Stephanie Wood, Fake is the...

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Music Reissues Weekly: The Twilights - Twilights Time The Complete 60s Recordings

On 26 September 1966, The Twilights set-off from Australia to Britain. The journey, on the liner the Castel Felice, took six weeks. A day after boarding they learned their sixth single, “Needle in a Haystack,” was an Australian number one. There was...

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Albums of the Year 2024: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Wild God

Young eldritch junkie Nick Cave would have struggled to predict his maturity as a font of wry and sacred wisdom, or the fathomless loss he reckoned with en route.Wild God followed the harrowed Skeleton Tree and grief-illumined Ghosteen, necessary...

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