AustLit

'‘Mae, you can fool the world, you can fool your friends and you can even fool yourself, but you can’t fool me…’

'Hollywood bombshell Mae West built her career on lookin’ good – walkin’ the walk and talkin’ the talk – while legendary photographer Diane Arbus was famous for finding beauty in the everyday. When Diane turns up at Mae’s glistening LA apartment in 1964 to take her portrait, tensions quickly flare. Mae’s version of herself is very different to the one Diane wants to catch on film. But whose version wins out when a master of illusion meets a master of truth?

'Drawing on actual events, award-winning Australian playwright Stephen Sewell imagines what might have transpired between these two extraordinary women, creating a powerful portrait of beauty, sexuality, wildness and longing.'

Source: Melbourne Theatre Company.

'A battle-weary Australian war correspondent named Frank meets a darkly fascinating woman on his way home. The two retire to his hotel suite where Frank finds his match in a frightening and erotic game of truth or dare that takes both to the edge, and over.' (Production summary)

'Kandahar Gate is a new play by Australian dramatist Stephen Sewell. This feverish "dream play" is loosely inspired by Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film "Rashomon," but transplants the action to contemporary Australia and centres on the death of a soldier in Afghanistan. At the dark heart of the play is an exploration of how 'truth' gets buried - by governments, the military and one's own memory. It is a powerful and deeply political piece of theatre from one of Australia's great playwrights. With an introduction by Jeff Janisheski.' (Publication summary)

'"Dan liked Rolston and Rolston liked Dan, they were made for one another. After the shootout at the House of Freedom five years before, where Mick had been arrested after killing nearly everyone in the brothel, life had settled into a very pleasant groove. Dan was a hero, no doubt. The genuine article who had single-handedly faced off with one of the most evil killers the country had ever known. He'd been decorated, interviewed and had his story told innumerable times in print and television. There was whisper of a movie, along the Dirty Harry line, even a franchise. He could have moved on; he could have retired. It was made known that he could even go into politics, but Dan liked it just the way it was, and announced that he was staying where he'd served with such dignity and dedication for so many years, right there in Rolston."

'The eagerly awaited sequel to Babylon, described by the Age as a "high-octane psychological suspense," The Captive picks up where Babylon left off, with Mick in his fifth year of a life sentence for multiple murders and about to be made an offer too hard to refuse by the policemen who put him there.

'Set in a world of ecological disaster and political corruption, The Captive continues the story as Mick is thrown back into the chaos to fight for his life and a future he isn't even sure he deserves.

'With writing as reminiscent of "Camus's The Outsider as it is the novels of Cormac McCarthy", The Captive propels the reader into a future already too close for comfort and a world too real to avoid.

'The Captive - If you're not fighting, you're already dead.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'It is not very well known that Paul Cezanne, the great painter whom Picasso described as "The father of us all," was a schoolboy friend of the acclaimed novelist, Emile Zola, famous not only for his prodigious output of ground-breaking novels, but also for his engaged political stance, culminating in his famous declaration of "J'accuse" in the infamous Dreyfus case, when France's anti-semitism was exposed to the world; but such is the case. Two great geniuses, born in Aix en Provence in France's south a year apart, each a revolutionary in his own way, Cezanne in his solitary field of painting, Zola in a much more public way, forthrightly standing against the terrible excesses of capitalism and bourgeois power in nineteenth century France, and paying for it in forced exile and - still many believe - with his life.

'And through it all the two remaining friends for decades.

'Until Zola's terrible betrayal when he depicted Cezanne as the failed painter in his novel The Masterpiece.

'The Bathers is a play depicting the end of their friendship on one terrible night as the two great men confront their past and their weaknesses. Written by one of Australia's most celebrated playwrights, it questions the nature of truth, of loyalty and of idealism as seen through the lens of two passionate men struggling to hold onto their love for one another while being torn apart by the unruliness of their spirits.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Armed robber Pope Cody is on the run from a gang of renegade detectives who want him dead.

'As revenge killings and paybacks explode onto Melbourne streets, seventeen-year-old J finds himself at the centre of a bloody struggle between his family and the police. J is forced to navigate his way past slippery lawyers, corrupt cops and a paranoid and vengeful underworld.

'To survive he must learn how the game is played and choose his place in the animal kingdom. He must work out where he fits.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Clarice has recently buried her husband, and now she wants to visit Egypt. Her daughter is appalled and her son-in-law is scathing, but as the violence in the Middle East escalates, Clarice might just find what she wants most of all amongst the ruins of ancient Egypt.

'Written in the heat of the latest Israel-Lebanon conflict, The Gates of Egypt is Stephen Sewell's impassioned examination of peace and vengeance. Part satire, part elegy, it cuts between suburban Australia and the muezzin calls of the Middle East. While Clarice travels back to the cradle of history, at home her children struggle with their own ability to love and forgive. The Gates of Egypt is a determined search for a way out of the mire of attack and counter-attack.'

Source: Belvoir St Theatre website, http://www.belvoir.com.au/
Sighted: 01/02/2007