Sorry for the lack of updates to the site, there seems to be a lull in Amy news lately which will hopefully pick up soon. In the meantime, I’ve updated the Home & Away section of the site with season summaries for 2006 – 2008 (written by the brilliant Laura!). Enjoy!
Another ‘Macbeth’ review has been added to the site, this time from Gay News Network
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Having heard so many good things about this outdoor Shakespeare season and curious to see how Macbeth would work its malign magic in the beautiful grounds of Everglades, I was initially disappointed to find myself circling the car park for a spot at the nearby Fairmont resort.
Due to the onset of rain, my fellow picnickers and I would now be spreading our blankets on the floor of the hotel ballroom. I needn’t have worried. We were welcomed in from the drizzle, promised a cracker of a show and by Jove did they deliver.
There are many things to praise in director/actor Damien Ryan’s production. For starters, the verse speaking is uniformly excellent. It is exciting to witness the swiftness of thought conveyed with such utter clarity. It lifts the audience. It also makes the text more accessible for Bard virgins, one of whom was sharing my Stilton (okay, we thought we’d be outside). Then there’s the fine ensemble work. It is highly energetic and tight as a drum. Still, for me, watching “the Scottish play”, I want shivers of fear shooting down my spine. I got them. The tension never dissipated. What I wasn’t expecting was such a rich portrait of an intimate, egalitarian, mature marriage. It was a nice surprise. As was finding out I cared about the Macbeths and so ultimately was saddened by their demise.
The cast is deep in acting talent. In the titular role, Ryan is horribly compelling. He’s also very charming, at the least in the beginning, quite deserving the “golden opinions” of others. He also appears to genuinely struggle with his conscience which makes for a wonderfully intense scene with Lady Macbeth (Amy Matthews) when she convinces him to “screw his courage to the sticking point”.
There is strong support from Christopher Tomkinson as Macduff and Amanda Stephens Lee as the Queen (the gender swap somehow makes Macbeth’s act of regicide even more chilling).
Sport for Jove is a great company. Its glory days are just beginning. I can’t wait to see the “Shrew” this weekend.
A new review for ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Taming of the Shrew’ from Time Out has been added to the site. It features more glowing reports on Amy’s performance!
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Over the past 12 months, Sport for Jove Theatre Company has turned out to be one of the most exciting finds for theatregoers willing to venture off the beaten Sydney theatre track. Positive word about their outdoor Shakespeare productions in early 2011 spread like wildfire, and their ambitious staging of The Libertine at Darlinghurst Theatre in 2011 similarly proved to be a revelation. Mark our words: there are big things in store for Sport for Jove – and subsequently for Sydney audiences too.
This January, the company is staging two Shakespeare plays, Macbeth and The Taming of the Shrew, outdoors in Leura’s Everglades Gardens as part of its third annual Leura Shakespeare Festival. Both plays are directed by Jove’s artistic director Damien Ryan – and let’s waste no more time: these are two brilliant productions. (more…)
A new review for ‘Macbeth’ from Arts Hub has been added to the site. It has some great things to say about Amy’s performance!
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In the programme for Sport for Jove’s Macbeth, actor-director Damien Ryan’s notes suggest an intriguing twist. Rather than gung-ho revelling in blood – spillage of characters’ and curdling of the audience’s – this production emphasises the human aspects of the play: lost children, motherhood, the inexorable passage of time. While the ghastly elements aren’t glossed over, they are given an emotional basis in the question: to what kinds of extreme acts can love drive people?
It is said of the Mahabharata that no Hindu encounters the text for the first time, such is its cultural ubiquity; and the same is true for the Shakespearean oeuvre within the English literary tradition. Especially those plays that are the most famous (or, in the case of Macbeth, infamous: superstitious actors prefer its euphemism ‘the Scottish play’), we hear the best-known lines before we find out where they have come from – or even that they are quotations.
Past performances haunt a new production like overdubs, or ghostly outlines, or the blood that Lady Macbeth can never entirely remove from her hands, no matter how many times she washes them. In the case of Macbeth, it was not a specific show that framed my expectations, but the way I had imagined it on first reading it as a child, a reading which instantly claimed it as my favourite: a mental image drawn in black and white and scarlet, in which a Bela Lugosi-like figure of Macbeth loomed – tormented, perhaps, but also one-dimensionally evil. The fascination of the play was its blood and guts, its supernatural darkness, its abundance of murder, madness and the macabre. (more…)
